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Rod Serling’s “The Twilight Zone” is the gold standard for anthology TV shows, science-fiction and fantasy TV series and, some might argue, TV shows period. The series, which ran for 156 episodes from 1959 to 1964, has some rivals for those accolades, for certain. “The Outer Limits,” broadcast from 1963 to 1965, had some sterling episodes. But Serling’s original series, often imitated, has never been duplicated. Although … I would argue that its first reboot, appearing on CBS for 65 episodes from 1985 to 1989, comes closer to capturing the spirit and integrity of the original – even closer than filmmaker Jordan Peele’s polished remake that aired 2019-2020. More on that reboot in a bit. The mid-1980s was an odd time for TV, with the debut of real prestige TV a few years away and only a few series that really stood out from the pack, including “St. Elsewhere” and “Hill Street Blues.” Even series with occasionally strong episodes like “Miami Vice” were very much a product of the commercial TV world of the time. The 1980s “Twilight Zone” definitely made concessions to be on broadcast TV. But – here’s the heresy – it comes closer to, even approaching, the quality of the original than any other series. But before all that, there was the word, and the word came from Rod Serling. Honoring Serling’s legacy Sometimes in the original “Twilight Zone,” creator/frequent writer Serling supplied only voice-over intros and outros for episodes. Often he appeared on camera and, like Alfred Hitchcock at the time, subsequently became a well-known figure to television viewers. In his narrations, Serling was by turns ominous, humorous and ironic, just like the 92 scripts he wrote for his 156-episode series. The playwright – whose work with “The Twilight Zone,” his lesser follow-up series “Night Gallery,” and film screenplays including “Requiem for a Heavyweight,” the prophetic political drama “Seven Days in May” and the original “Planet of the Apes” – shined a light on humanity in a manner that even the most common denominator of viewers could understand. He won a Peabody, Emmys and turned himself into a cultural touchstone. Time is passing, for certain, but a large percentage of the population still knows enough about Rod Serling to, at least, have a sense of what he contributed to the culture before his death in 1975. Serling lived on through his writing but also for a fleeting glimpse we get of him in the opening credits for the reboot series, which began on CBS in September 1985 and appeared, in sometimes truncated form, into 1989 (the third and final season airing through television syndication). In 65 episodes, more or less, running an hour long but usually consisting of a couple of 20-minute-plus stories plus shorts, the 1980s “Twilight Zone” helped perpetuate Serling and his best-known achievement for another generation of fans. And while it was at it, the reboot featured early-, late- or career-high performances from the likes of Danny Kaye, Glynn Turman, Morgan Freeman, William Peterson, Frances McDormand, Bruce Willis, James Cromwell, Helen Mirren, Elliot Gould, Adolph Caesar, Mare Winningham … just too many others to mention. And it provided a showcase for the work of authors and screenwriters like Stephen King, Harlan Ellison, Ray Bradbury, Alan Brennert, Richard Matheson, George R.R. Martin, Robert Crais and David Gerrold, Rod Serling himself and directors including Wes Craven, William Friedkin, Joe Dante, John Milius and Martha Coolidge. For a while, the 1980s “Twilight Zone” was the place to be, obviously. A reboot you ‘Need to Know’ If you watched the series when it originally aired, it’s likely a few episodes still stick with you. The first season episode “Gramma,” Harlan Ellison’s adaptation of Stephen King’s original story, is remembered as one of the scariest things to appear on TV at the time. The King original, which appeared in his collection “Skeleton Crew,” is about a boy who’s scared to be left home alone with his ailing grandmother … and with good reason. As memorable as “Gramma” was, a few others live on in my memory, although not for scares. These episodes featured Serling-worthy stories, characters and twists. “Profile in Silver” might be my favorite episode of the reboot. Writer John Hancock’s story finds a 22nd century instructor at Harvard going on a solo personal field trip back in time to observe the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The academic Joseph Fitzgerald (Lane Smith) can’t bear to let JFK (Andrew Robinson) be killed, however. He warns him just as shots ring out in Dallas. JFK and a suspicious Secret Service supervisor reward Fitzgerald with a trip back to D.C. But almost immediately, other events – severe weather, political assassinations and military action – break out and Fitzgerald, a distant descendant of Kennedy, becomes convinced he must undo the heroic action that saved the president’s life. “Need to Know” is probably my other favorite episode. William L. Peterson, star of films like “Manhunter” and “To Live and Die in L.A.,” stars as a government agent who comes to a small town where insanity seems to be contagious. Frances McDormand is the town resident who asked for help when her father went mad. Tension builds and the episode – based on a story by Sidney Sheldon, no less – has the same feeling of dread and paranoia as “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” And that ending! There’s “Shatterday,” written by Ellison, directed by Craven and starring Willis, about a man who loses himself but is replaced; “Paladin of the Lost Hour,” starring Kaye and Turman, about a man who keeps the world running, in a tale that might remind viewers of Ray Bradbury; “Her Pilgrim Soul,” about a lab experiment that recreates a woman (the wonderful stage actress Anne Twomey) from the past; and lighter fare like “I of Newton,” “The Uncle Devil Show” and “Dealer’s Choice.” I can’t argue that every episode of the 1980s show is the equal of the original, which was a collective masterpiece. It’s hard to imagine how any series could come closer, though. There was a “Twilight Zone” movie, of course, and two more attempts to recreate the small-screen success of Serling’s vision. Remakes still in fashion I have almost no memory of the 2002 reboot of “The Twilight Zone,” featuring Forest Whitaker as the host and narrator. The reboots are always a study in which actors are hot at the time, and this reboot featured performances from Jason Alexander, Lou Diamond Phillips, Jason Bateman and even Bill Mumy, returning in a follow-up to the “It’s a Good Life” story from the very first version of the show. Titus Welliver and Andrew McCarthy are among the neighbors freaking out in a new version of “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street.” About 42 stories were told over the course of a single season, usually two per episode. More interesting, although still lacking compared to the first two incarnations of the show, is director and host Jordan Peele’s remake that aired in 2019 and 2020. The series had big names – Kumail Nanjiani and Tracy Morgan in the first episode alone, followed in later episodes by Adam Scott (in a more paranoid remake of the original series’ “Nightmare at 30,000 feet”) and others. I swear it seems like a preponderance of episodes feature people in the entertainment industry and it feels too self-referential. I did like the conceit that the episodes took place in the same world, however, with the airliner from “Nightmare” showing up as a model on a flight to Mars in another episode and Nanjiani’s face on magazine covers in another episode. I wanted to like Peele’s version more than I did, but I was struck by how slow some of the 20 episodes seem. The inclination to give each story an hour – probably intended to emphasize the gravitas of the series – seemed to work against the punchiness of the franchise. Sci-fi and fantasy anthologies are still very much a thing, with “Black Mirror” presenting absorbing and disturbing stories in the “Twilight Zone” manner. There’s no series that equals the story-telling power of the original, however, except for its 1980s incarnation. View the full article

“How do you get your ideas?” Novelists are asked that question all the time. Answering it is a little like trying to explain how you got your personality or why you keep having that dream about showing up for a book signing completely naked. This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of my first novel, The Pardon, in which Miami criminal defense attorney Jack Swyteck made his debut. Jack is back for an eighteenth adventure in Goodbye Girl. Psychoanalysis aside, I can say from experience that the ideas for this long-running series have come to me in one of two ways. Sometimes, it’s the proverbial bolt of lightning. Other times, the story percolates for months, even years. The Pardon: A Bolt of Lightning For my first published novel, the “bolt of lightning” came in the form of a brush with Miami-Dade Police. My girlfriend (now my wife) and her family had lost their home to Hurricane Andrew and were living with me in a two-bedroom townhouse with no electricity. Right around then, my literary agent called to tell me that he had knocked on every publisher’s door in New York and, “Sorry, James, no one wants to buy your book.” The manuscript I had written over the past four years, while practicing law full time at a major Miami law firm, had crashed and burned. But there was a glimmer of hope. “You got the best rejection letters I’ve ever seen,” my agent said. “Try again.” I was afraid. I couldn’t waste another four years going down the wrong path. I spent night after night staring at a blank computer screen. One night around one a.m., I needed a break from my computer, so I went for a walk. A Miami-Dade Police appeared out of nowhere. “Can I see some identification?” the cop said. I had none—no wallet, no driver’s license, nothing. I was dressed in jogging shorts and T-shirt, ready for bed. “Someone reported a peeping-Tom in the neighborhood,” the officer explained. I stood nervously beside the squad car as he called in on his radio. The dispatcher recited the physical description of the prowler, and I could almost see the cop ticking off similarities on his mental check list. “Under six feet,” the dispatcher said. Check. “Mid-thirties.” Check. “Brown hair, brown eyes.” Double check. “Wearing blue shorts and white T-shirt.” Holy crap! I’m going to jail! “And a mustache,” the dispatcher finally added. The cop narrowed his eyes, trying to discern whether someone could have mistakenly thought I had a mustache. Finally, he said, “Go home.” I walked quickly, thankful I wasn’t riding downtown in the back of a squad car. An arrest would have surely put me in the newspaper. Just being arrested could have ruined me. My life had nearly changed forever. And in another way, it had. The feeling of being innocent and accused left my heart pounding. I took that feeling to the most dramatic extreme and wrote a scene about a death row inmate, hours away from execution for murder he may not have committed. That scene I wrote that night—all night—is the opening scene of The Pardon, my debut novel, published by HarperCollins in 1994. Goodbye Girl: Ten Years in the Percolator Have you ever downloaded music or movies without paying for them? Digital piracy costs the entertainment industry billions. No one can stop it, and in that sense, Goodbye Girl is a dark journey into the virtual Wild West. The tag line for the novel reads “A contentious intellectual piracy case leads to an unsolved murder, and Jack Swyteck’s client—a pop music icon—is the accused killer.” It sounds like something out of today’s headlines. But the idea percolated in my head for more than a decade. In 2010 I was one of the lawyers involved in an epic courtroom battle for ownership of EMI Records. EMI and its iconic labels have been home to countless recording stars, from Frank Sinatra and the Beatles to Bob Dylan and Mariah Carey. In 2007 EMI was acquired in a deal worth €5.9 billion, and the buyer sued, feeling cheated. A big part of EMI’s financial trouble was music piracy. It was killing the entire recording industry. Our legal team lost the trial, but with an inside look at the ravages of piracy, I came away thinking, “there has to be a novel here.” Piracy and pop stars seemed like fertile ground, but I write legal thrillers, and I needed a place for Jack Swyteck in my story. Then came the real-life battle between Taylor Swift and Scooter Braun. Braun and his companies controlled the rights to Taylor Swift’s master recordings, which meant that he was in a better position than anyone to profit from her original catalogue. Swift then re-recorded her first six albums and told her millions of fans to buy “Taylor’s Version.” Brilliant. With that, a story came to me. Jack Swyteck represents “Imani,” a fictional pop icon whose professional nemesis is her ex-husband. Imani would rather thieves profit from her music than let her ex-husband pocket the royalties. She doesn’t re-record her albums. Instead, she tells her fans to “Go Pirate!” A contentious legal battle ensues, and someone ends up dead. Imani has more legal problems than she can handle, and her lawyer, Jack, is at the center of the storm. Was it the percolator (piracy) or the bolt of lightning (Taylor Swift’s brilliant business move) that inspired Goodbye Girl? Maybe a little bit of both. *** View the full article

The term Cascadia conjures images of thick green forests, lush ferns that could swallow a small car, creeping pea-soup fog, windswept bluffs with crashing ocean waves far below, and buckets upon buckets of rain. Those forest are filled with wild animals, some of them of the folklore variety. But the bioregion of Cascadia is so much more than rain-soaked coastlines, extending from southern Alaska to San Francisco, then expanding east to claim all of Washington, and most of British Columbia, Oregon, Idaho, and even a bit of Montana. There’s some rolling farmland and high mountain terrain thrown in for good measure. It’s a diverse region where the flora and fauna make it a little too easy for comfort to hide a body in the woods. What better atmosphere could there possibly be for authors to delve deep into crime fiction or readers to curl up with a good book while rain pelts the windows? I’ve spent most of my life in Cascadia, reading under those towering trees, so it was natural for me to set my new cozy mystery, Hammers and Homicide, deep in the heart of it all. Set in a small town in the Blue Mountains of Oregon, my main character is running her hardware store and enjoying the golden beauty of late August, until a land developer is murdered in her store. Below are seven crime reads that overflow with the spirit of Cascadia. Snow Falling on Cedars, David Guterson One of the most atmospheric books to take you right into the heart of Cascadia’s “falling waters” temperament, is David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars. This book has had a coveted spot on my favorites shelf for years. It is set on San Piedro, a fictional island off the Washington coast where local fisherman Kabuo Miyamoto is on trial for the murder of Karl Heine. It’s alleged that Miyamoto killed his fellow fisherman over a land dispute dating back to WWII when the Japanese-American residents of the island were rounded up and sent to relocation camps. A winter storm on the craggy, remote island brings plenty of slashing rain and freezing fog to immerse the reader straight into those Pacific Northwest vibes. Secrets Don’t Sink, K.B. Jackson K.B. Jackson’s Secrets Don’t Sink takes us inland about twenty miles, but keeps us in a harbor town on a tidal river in Washington’s Puget Sound area. When journalist Audrey O’Connell delves deep into the town’s history in order to write a feature article for an upcoming town festival, she finds far more than she bargained for. Buried history, family secrets, and murder make for a compelling read. Jackson dives into the area’s indigenous Coast Salish roots and secrets that will turn the small town on its head. Death on Tap, Ellie Alexander Staying in Washington for one more book, Ellie Alexander’s Death on Tap takes us east to the Bavarian-themed village of Leavenworth in the Cascade Mountains. This is the first in a series where craft beer brewer Sloan Krause brews up tasty pints and manages to get herself entangled in murder mysteries. In Death on Tap, Sloan has left her husband and her position at the Krause family brewery. She’s gone to work at Nitro, a new brewery in town and is settling in just fine. But when Sloan finds another brewer dead in the fermenting tub with Nitro’s secret recipe in hand, the calm she was beginning to find froths over. Alexander does a great job of bringing the reader right into the heart of the Cascades with her vibrant descriptions of snow-encrusted peaks and crisp mountain air. The Child Finder, Rene Denfeld Moving south, The Child Finder by Rene Denfeld takes the reader deep into Oregon’s Skookum National Forest. Three years before, five-year-old Madison Culver disappeared while on a family outing to cut a Christmas tree. Told from multiple POVs, Naomi is “the child finder,” a private investigator known for her almost eerie knack for locating missing persons. The other voice is “the snow child,” a young girl whose identity remains hidden for much of the haunting story. Even though this book really goes into some dark places, the evocative atmosphere of the snowy forest holds the reader captive with its haunting beauty. Hidden Pieces, Mary Keliikoa Let’s take a detour over to the northern Oregon coast in Mary Keliikoa’s Hidden Pieces. Sheriff Jax Turner is at the end of his rope when a call comes in that a fourteen-year-old girl left for the school bus stop one morning, but never made it onto the bus. Her backpack is found in an unregistered sex offender’s car, and as the case begins to echo a cold case from Jax’s early career, he’s bound and determined to rescue the girl and not repeat the mistakes of the past. The setting is impeccable and moody with towering trees and sideways rain. The fact that it transports the reader to my beloved northern Oregon coast doesn’t hurt one little bit. The Book of Cold Cases, Simone St. James Next, we’re going to stay oceanside with The Book of Cold Cases by Simone St. James. The setting is the dark and rainswept Oregon coast where the biggest mansions hold the heaviest secrets, and some crimes come back to haunt you. True crime blogger, Shea, has a morbid fascination with the unsolved 1970s Lady Killer Murders, so when she meets the woman who was accused, and acquitted, of the murders, she implores the older woman to grant her an interview. The story is told from both women’s viewpoints and moves back and forth through time as the story unfolds. St. James is a master at building a sense of place. This supernatural tale of suspense gave me a chill as if the pounding Pacific Northwest rain was dripping down my spine. Welcome Home to Murder, Rosalie Spielman Lastly, let’s pivot east to the fictional town of New Oslo, Idaho in Rosalie Spielman’s Welcome Home to Murder. This is the first book in the Hometown Mysteries. Recently retired Army veteran Tessa Treslow has reluctantly returned to her small hometown with her dog Vince in tow. While she’s deciding what’s next, she’s happy to put her mechanic skills to use by helping out at her aunt’s auto body shop. But when a man is murdered in Aunt Edna’s garage on the night Tessa returns to town, it looks as if someone is framing Aunt Edna for the murder. Not about to let her aunt take the fall, Tessa throws herself into finding the real killer. Not only does Spielman do a fabulous job showing the beauty of this rural area, the addition of Mangus the Moose charging through the woods will leave readers hooting with laughter. While the setting for New Oslo is still Cascadia, it’s much more rural farming country than lush coastal setting, highlighting the diversity of the bioregion. *** View the full article

When I was eight, I read a book that would dictate the course of my life. That book was Harriet the Spy. As a kid in suburban California, I was endlessly curious. About ancient Egypt, about animals, and about my neighbors. Suburbia, as we’ve read in countless domestic thrillers, is a place of secrets. I didn’t know this explicitly when I was a child, of course. But I think I sensed it. Which is why when I picked up Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy, it made total sense. I could spy on my neighbors, just like Harriet, and find out All The Things! It was easy to believe that adults were concealing some choice secrets. I didn’t find out anything interesting, but I did get to know my neighborhood and the act of scribbling on paper fostered my love of journals and notebooks. (I need to issue a blanket apology here to the folks who lived in Rincon Valley in Santa Rosa, California, in the mid-70s. Sorry for skulking around your yards.) But while I was traipsing around my street, poking around for anything amiss, I was unknowingly preparing for my dual adult careers: journalist and novelist. Harriet taught me to observe, and to write. She taught me to think critically and ask questions. Most of all, she taught me to be skeptical of authority (although in fairness, my hippie father did that too. Hey, it was the seventies!) I think about Harriet a lot while writing cozy mysteries. Creating a character whose sole mission is to snoop around when they’re not law enforcement isn’t easy. Let’s face it: one of the main things that’s charming about cozy mysteries is also the genre’s Achilles Heel. How does an everyday person turn into an amateur sleuth? In real life, someone who did that would be considered dangerous, or very, very odd. This is a frequent criticism of the genre. The idea of a baker/librarian/florist learning of a homicide (and possibly even is a suspect themselves) then becoming so moved that they launch their own investigation is, at its core, bonkers. It’s also what cozy fans adore. Harriet the Spy laid the groundwork for this. It wasn’t just about snooping; it was about curiosity, about seeing beyond what’s under the surface. I think that’s why reporters in cozy mysteries are so satisfying to me and why my first cozy series (The Coffee Lover’s Mystery series) is based on a former journalist. The concept takes the DIY ethos of Harriet and merges it with a character who has a totally legitimate reason to investigate. They need to bring their readers the truth — what could be more important than that? They’re supposed to ask questions. They’re put on this earth to be pests. True story: as a journalist, one of my sources called me a “pest.” I took it as a badge of honor. It’s that relentless pursuit of truth that Harriet instilled in me, guiding both my fiction and real-life adventures in digging up the stories that matter. Here are some cozy mysteries with reporter heroines: Front Page Murder by Joyce Tremel: This is a WWII-set mystery about Irene Ingram, whose newspaper publisher father has gone to work as a war correspondent. She’s the editor-in-chief in her father’s absence, and that rankles some men in the newsroom. She also ruffles feathers when she starts asking questions about the death of the paper’s star crime reporter. While trying to keep her family’s small-town paper alive, she also stumbles upon an antisemitic crime tied to the murder. Not only did Tremel capture the era wonderfully, she also accurately portrayed the hectic routine of a small town newspaper person, too. A Dash of Death by Michelle Hillen Klump: Laid off journalists are a staple in real life, and it was good to see Klump reflect this reality in her book. Samantha Warren lost her investigative reporting job and her fiancé — but she’s starting a new mixology company and is featuring her homemade bitters at an event. Someone turns up dead and one of Samantha’s drinks was poisoned with oleander. This book features lots of investigation and great descriptions of the Houston food scene. Doomed by Blooms by Anna St. John: Once a reporter always a reporter, and when heroine Josie Posey retires, she finds that she longs to get back into the action. She’s asked by the local paper to do a fluff piece on a local ballerina — but then the dancer’s husband turns up dead. The story features a spirited group of friends and a sheepdog named Moe. Live, Local and Dead by Nikki Knight: Radio DJ Jaye Jordan leaves her New York City life and buys a small town Vermont radio station. But when she’s target practicing with a snowman, she stumbles upon a dead host — that she fired. Includes a flatulent moose and a cute cat! Knight is also a real-life radio host for legendary New York City radio station 1010 WINS. Off the Air by Christina Estes: Jolene Garcia is a local TV reporter in Phoenix, Arizona, splitting her time between covering general assignments—anything from a monsoon storm to a newborn giraffe at the zoo—and special projects. Jolene investigates the murder of a controversial talk show host, who died under suspicious circumstances. Jolene conducted his final interview, giving her and her station an advantage. But not for long…This book comes out March 26. A Bean to Die For by Tara Lush: Former crime reporter Lana Lewis is fully embracing her post-journalism life. Her coffee shop is thriving, her shih tzu needs a haircut, and she’s meeting her boyfriend’s family for the first time. But when an elderly environmental activist is found dead in the community garden, Lana’s snooping instincts kick into high gear — and then there’s a second murder… View the full article

Despite a backdrop of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions threatening travel plans to Iceland, I was able to catch up with Louise Penny, author of the popular Three Pines traditional mysteries starring Inspector Gamache. We talked over breakfast at the Hotel Saga in Reykjavik one Saturday morning during November’s Iceland Noir conference. Given the conference line-up, it felt right that nature would go out of its way to greet the stars. How often will you find Richard Armitage, Dan Brown, Neil Gaiman, Lisa Jewell, C.J. Tudor, and Irvine Welsh all sharing the same space, along with many fine authors working a range of genres*. But there’s more: The day before we met Louise had been in conversation with A.J. Finn, and the next day she would take part in an interview with Hillary Clinton and Eliza Reid, the first lady of Iceland – who has also written a crime novel, to be released in 2025, called Death of a Diplomat. (All of Reykjavik, it seemed, was overrun with illustrious crime writers with connections to the world of politics. Katrín Jakobsdóttir, the prime minister of Iceland, also has collaborated with Ragnar Jonasson on a noir novel called Reykjavik.) Louise has changed little in the fifteen years I’ve known her, with the same flawless, makeup-free complexion, the same hairstyle, and the same intense focus from behind stylish eyeglasses. Dressed casually in a beige cashmere sweater and jeans and a brightly patterned scarf, she’s an imposingly tall woman who seems to have found her “cozy” style years ago and stayed with it. She is also still famously nice, friendly, and welcoming. Speaking of “cozy, she and I agreed that the term as a book category needs to go and be replaced in bookshops by “traditional mystery,” particularly for authors writing in the vein of Agatha Christie. How exactly did Louise get to where she is today? Nothing in her background seemed likely to provide fodder for a future crime writer, except for that feeling of being an “outsider” – a feeling many authors seem to share. As the daughter of investment professionals and sister to two engineer brothers, she says she often felt like the odd one out in her intensely logical family. Likening herself to Marilyn Munster – the “normal” one who couldn’t see how strange her family appeared to the outside world – Louise says she wasn’t academically inclined and barely scraped out “C” grades in school. She was dreamy rather than analytical, but it was this trait that eventually led her, after a career in radio broadcasting, to writing. She became an “overnight” success after a few years of struggle, placing in CWA’s Debut Dagger competition with the story that would become A Fatal Grace. In recent years she has had to navigate significant life changes, including the loss of her beloved children’s-physician husband, Michael, to dementia. Eventually, with the help of a realtor friend, she moved out of the condo where she lived with Michael into a dream house, a one-level built for aging in place, sited on a six-acre plot of land outside the picturesque Quebec village of Knowlton in Canada. This new home is now complete with an El Chapo-like tunnel connecting her garage to the house, replacing an old garage that was too narrow for her car. The house is her sanctuary, shared only with her dog Muggins, who barks at leaves but ignores the teams of workmen, assuming the leaves are up to no good but the workmen are welcome. She likes being alone, she says, and cherishes her solitude. Having lived in Knowlton for many years, she says a common misconception is that her hometown is the basis for her fictional Three Pines, and its population the basis for some of her characters. But she feels embraced by her community, and safeguarded by them from curious fans, an aspect of life among the villagers she deeply appreciates. It is clear from her writing that her fluency in English and French, a gift shared by many Quebecois, has woven its way into her narrative. One focus of our conversation was her recent collaboration with Hillary Rodham Clinton on their political thriller. Louise admitted to feeling trepidation about venturing from her secure literary path and feared fan and reviewer reactions (“But where’s Three Pines? Where’s Gamache?”). However, Hillary’s response to Louise’s question, “What fear keeps you up at night?” became the kickstarter for their thriller. The collaboration between Penny and Clinton, born of mutual admiration during the pandemic, presented challenges, especially in melding their distinct writing habits and styles. Penny, who prefers writing and Facetiming or Zooming in her moose pajamas, had to adjust to Clinton’s preference for marking up printed pages and faxing them back and forth rather than tracking changes in Word. Hillary’s daughter Chelsea had to make the same adjustment when she collaborated with her mother. Peaceful protestors at Reykjavik’s Harpa venue, near the foot of the stairs leading to the Eldborg hall where the conversation among the three women took place, bore witness to the fact the world remains a vastly unsettled and unpredictable place. Perhaps the best writers can do is observe, listen, and try to warn. Given the sort of books we both write, Louise still seems to believe, with me, in a world where order can be restored in the end, and justice prevail. Asked if she will be returning to Three Pines in 2024, she said absolutely. She had only taken a hiatus from Gamache because of her book with Hillary. The date and title for Gamache’s return will soon be announced. View the full article

Our goal with all of our books is always to write something fun and fast-paced, but it also must touch on certain themes like privilege, racism and the inequality of our justice system because that’s the reality of the world we live in. That’s our experience and there’s no way to avoid it. We want our books to be part escapism, part very genuine critiques of the corrosive effects of social inequalities—but never with a heavy hand. Our stories are aggressive in their messaging but subtle in their execution, and our murder mystery, Perfect Little Lives is a quintessential example of that. This way there’s a backdrop of social commentary that isn’t on the nose or in your face because that’s how it is in real life; Racism is insidious, it’s not usually explicit and in your face. Alyssa Cole’s debut thriller set in gentrified Brooklyn is brilliant because it takes something that a lot of us don’t think about often even though we see it happening before our eyes and makes it extremely ominous. When No One Is Watching is an entire vibe, an insidious, chilling ride with a twist that’s shocking but not far from the realm of possibility, which makes it even more menacing. Cole’s exploration of the horror of gentrification for the longtime black residents in this neighborhood is complex and cutting. There’s also a subplot involving a supporting character with a reveal you won’t see coming that deepens and grounds the story in the best way. Wanda M. Morris’ debut is immaculate. With great nuance, she tackles the insidious nature of white supremacy in All Her Little Secrets. Our protagonist is an astute, underestimated black woman, a successful corporate lawyer who’s sleeping with her married boss. But this is only where her secrets begin. After she finds her paramour dead in his office one morning, she decides not to contact the authorities. She doesn’t want to get dragged into the investigation because of their sordid relationship. She then is offered an incredible promotion as his successor, but there must be a catch, right? In a second timeline, we follow her adolescent years in Chillicothe, Georgia when a life-altering tragedy changed the trajectory of her life. Kia Abdullah’s exploration of rape culture in Truth Be Told which involves an extremely privileged student at an elite all-boys boarding school is truly exquisite. From page one, you will be gripped. What she does is very simple but so smart. A wealthy student claims that he was sexually assaulted by another male student and thinks it’s the end. But it’s only the tumultuous beginning of an emotionally harrowing roller coaster and Abdullah brilliantly takes us on the ride with our protagonist as we toggle between thinking he’s telling the truth, hoping he’s telling the truth and just wanting the truth. In this story all about morals and ethics, Abdullah redefines what a courtroom drama can be and layers in incredibly poignant emotional depth so when you finish the story, it stays with you in your subconscious for months. S.A. Cosby’s Razorblade Tears is the perfect example of how you effortlessly blend social commentary with a solid suspense plot complete with well-developed, multi-dimensional, beautifully flawed characters. The message is clear but the delivery is never didactic; you never feel like you are being forced in one way or the other. You aren’t told which character is the “villain” or which you should root for. What S.A. Cosby does in this book is actually brilliant because he simply presents all of his character’s shortcomings and lets you make the judgments. In this story, we follow two convicted felons, Ike and Buddy Lee, who have both acclimated back into society and come together on a mission to find out who murdered their sons. Through their journey Cosby raises so many interesting points about addressing your own internalized homophobia and invites people to have the uncomfortable conversations they maybe need to have but are afraid to. All of S.A. Cosby’s novels have something interesting to say about society while being wrapped in a tight, page-turning narrative, but All The Sinners Bleed is truly a masterpiece when it comes to delicately addressing two of the most buzzed about political topics right now: school shootings and black kids being killed by white police officers. In this story, the main character—the first responder who is called to deal with the tragedy—is a black sheriff in a small, racist town. The suspense builds once we follow the sheriff as he tries to figure out why this seemingly innocent student suddenly decided to shoot up the school. But this is not your average mystery novel narrated by a detective. The character work is steep and layered. The book also doesn’t harp on the topics it brings up, it throws them out there and then allows you to have the discussion, which is exactly S.A. Cosby’s style. *** View the full article

It never dawned on me how much I use ‘friends as family’ as a trope in what I write. Hindsight is a funny thing. From that first book I wrote thirty novels ago to Death at a Scottish Wedding (Lucy Connelly), coming out in January, friends play an essential role in developing my main characters and the plot. In the Lucy Connelly Sea Isle series, Dr. Emilia leaves everyone behind when she moves from Seattle to a small town in Scotland, but her friends in the new village become closer than any family ever could. Not only do they help her solve crimes, but they are there when times are tough. While I’m lucky enough to come from a loving family, I wouldn’t survive without those I call friends. I find it interesting that it has become a relationship I consistently explore, but I am not alone in my love for found families in literature. From the world of Harry Potter to Rebecca Yarros’ Fourth Wing, friends as family play a central theme in books. Those friends sometimes save lives or are simply there for us during the most challenging times. They scoop us up off the floor and help us face difficult situations. Most importantly, they often help heal the loneliest of hearts. Fourth Wing, by Rebecca Yarros In Fourth Wing, by Rebecca Yarros, the heroine, Violet Sorrengail, has a family. Her mother and sister are strong dragon riders. But the friends she makes in the Rider’s Quadrant become her true family, which is why it hurts when some of them die while trying to succeed at the treacherous school. Violet is considered fragile and a target through most of the first book, but her friends help her become stronger by training her. And even though she comes up with clever ways around specific problems, her friends are always there for her, even if some of them are frenemies like Xaden Riorson. The twist is that although some friends are protective of her, they may not be doing what is best for Violet’s personal growth. Sometimes, those frenemies do far more for her than she could have ever imagined. But she needs her friends if she is to survive. Other Birds, Sarah Addison Allen In Sarah Addison Allen’s Other Birds, Zoey Hennessey feels like a third wheel around her father’s new family. She heads across the country to Mallow Island, South Carolina, to claim her dead mother’s apartment at The Dellawisp complex. She makes friends with a grieving chef, a woman on the run, mysterious strangers, and a few ghosts. The more she learns about her oddball neighbors, the more they become like family to her. And while she needs to heal from a painful past, so do these new people in her life. That creates an unexpected bond that grows as they work together to learn to trust again and confront their deepest fears. Like most found families, they discover they are much stronger when they work together. It is through helping others that she heals her heart and finds her way in the world. The Little Paris Bookshop, by Nina George The broken-hearted Monsieur Perdu, who owns a literary apothecary, doesn’t realize how lonely he is until he sets sail on the Seine in Nina George’s The Little Paris Bookshop. While he cures what ails his customers by using books as medicine, he cannot quite do that for himself. Friendships are imposed upon him as he continues his adventure to the South of France. As he helps to heal his friends’ hearts on the barge ride, he discovers something strange happening to his emotional growth. Through his friends’ courage, he finds the power to risk everything for love again. Small Town, Big Magic, by Hazel Beck Emerson Wilde has a great group of friends and a successful business in Hazel Beck’s Small Town, Big Magic. The friends have become her surrogate family since her sister abandoned her, and the rest of her family is gone. But when strange magical creatures attack her, she soon learns everyone, including her friends, have been hiding the truth. She’s a witch. While she isn’t initially happy with them for the secrecy, she soon discovers her friends were only trying to protect her. And when evil comes to town, her friends are the only people who can help her fight the unknown. She can’t survive without them. Virgin River, by Robyn Carr The popular Netflix series Virgin River is based on Robyn Carr’s novel, where nurse practitioner Melinda Monroe runs away from her life to a remote mountain town. The recently widowed Melinda soon discovers her new life isn’t exactly how she dreamed it would be. But it is through the friendships she makes that she soon finds her place in the small town. As she is helping others, her heart begins to heal. The friends she makes become her surrogate family, and she will do anything to protect them. Harry Potter, by J.K. Rowling Where would Harry Potter be without his friends Hermione and Ron? In each adventure, their bond grows until they become as close as family. They are there for one another. That doesn’t mean those bonds aren’t sometimes tested, as they were in Goblet of Fire, but they become as close as any family could be. It takes a few lessons, but they discover they are much stronger together and can’t fight any foe who comes their way. Through the series, they ultimately become one big happy family. *** View the full article

A stranger comes to town. He is stern, quiet, with a whiff of criminality, seductive to women and men alike, his life like an arrow shooting him onward. He meets a family, he befriends a boy, he almost falls for another man’s wife, and then he saves them all in a burst of gunfire. Rider from Nowhere first appeared in serial in Argosy magazine, but by the time it reached book form, it bore the name of its emblematic lead character, Shane. Jack Schaefer’s 1949 novel sold 12 million copies. George Stevens’ blockbuster 1953 movie led a pack of Western films racing across the 1950s, including The Gunfighter, Man of the West, High Noon, The Man from Laramie, 3:10 to Yuma, and many more. Shane has been claimed as a favorite movie by Woody Allen, Anthony Hopkins, and Professor X. Even Marvel’s 2017 Logan pays homage to Shane, a final monologue ripped verbatim from the original film. If Schaefer is largely forgotten today, his character blazes on in the American psyche. “A gun is as good—and as bad—as the man who carries it,” claims Shane. Then he shoots down greedy outlaws to prove it. Guns don’t kill people. People kill people. Historians have drawn clear lines between classic Westerns and NRA marketing campaigns, between Shaefer’s vision of masculinity and the need to possess your own rifle for the moment when your inner Shane must rise up to rescue your society. The lone rider’s stark silhouette, magnified by screen and time, hides his creators’ complicated feelings about his existence. Jack Schaefer would never again write a book as hopeful about the American West. Shane’s film director, George Stevens, actually intended to impress on audiences the horrors of gun violence. Stevens rigged the film’s two victims with hidden wires, to jerk them backwards when shot. He fired a high-caliber gun into a can to amplify its sound. In a 2017 interview in The Nation, Hernan Diaz situates the heroic unambiguity of Shane within an overall failure of the Western novel to achieve great literature in its heyday. Name any Western dime novels without the help of Google, challenges Diaz. “You’d expect [the Western] to be central to the American literary canon because it’s so perfect as an ideological tool,” he says. “It’s the culmination of individualism, it’s an ideological tale of the birth of the nation, it romanticizes genocide… And yet most people will be hard-pressed to name three Western writers before Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry.” I would have named Shane. I read it in sixth grade, in 1980s Vermont, unconscious of its sexism and its whiteness. I read it like the boy who is its narrator, who is hungry for experience, for adult knowing. Although Shane’s worldview is dated, the novel projects the timeless quest of innocence in our bloody world. Shane altered the Western landscape in my mind into an open plain where lives were writ large, and shattered and solved by violence. Canyons and buttes, and America’s past and future fused to the tragic, to the isolated figure of Shane, casting his long shadow. One day, I would move to the West myself. I would sit in a park, reading, in downtown Los Angeles when a plane flew overhead. It was right after 9/11. I looked up. We all looked up, everyone sitting by that bubbling fountain beside the skyscrapers. The dark shape of our doom droned across the sky above. We expected it to smash into a building and the building to fall. “They’re not supposed to do that,” muttered a security guard near me, meaning no one was supposed to fly close to downtowns anymore, not after the attack in New York. Then she shook her head and sighed. That fall, I first had an idea for a Western novel of my own, for a stranger who comes to town, carrying her complicated past, hoping for a shot at redemption, and maybe retribution, too. Instead of riding a horse, Edith walks along in a wrinkled skirt and sneaker boots, and instead of being young and handsome and male, she is old and a woman. But she is also a symbol of 20th century white America, an America finally erased by the planes flying into the World Trade Center. My grandmother’s America. Shane’s America. Twenty years later, after our country nearly broke into civil unrest, I wrote the novel and called it Goldenseal, after a cure that was never taken. If I may argue with Diaz’s earlier declaration, the Western should not be viewed as a stunted genre from an earlier era, but a vibrant, flexible strand of American literature, forever tied with individualism and our route west, to the cost of this, and to figures who ride the margins of our society, revealing to us its true edges. Shane lives on in the novels and collection below, not exactly the man he was, or even a man at all, but finding his way. If Jack Schaefer made the Western horizon into an infinitely unreachable elsewhere, these remarkable 21st century books remind us to take stock of where and how we’ve arrived. Tod Goldberg, The Gangsterland Series When Chicago hitman Sal Cupertine goes into the witness protection program and emerges a Bruce Springsteen-quoting rabbi in Las Vegas, the Western novel realizes a powerful new incarnation in Tod Goldberg’s now five-book series. “Tod Goldberg is part-Chandler, part-shaman, and all-killer,” writes Brad Meltzer of the series’ culminating 2023 novel, Gangsters Never Die. At the same time Goldberg’s comic noir narration subverts the self-seriousness of Shane, his multi-book tale of a gangster’s exile, reinvention, and belonging becomes a poignant recasting of the “rider from nowhere.” Mohsin Hamid, Exit West Although Mohsin Hamid’s 2017 novel starts in another country, his lead character Nadia possesses Shane’s impeccable style from her first scene, speeding off on her motorcycle in a black helmet. Hamid’s gleaming, allegorical novel follows Nadia and her new boyfriend Saeed, as wartime violence displaces their young lives. Together they journey across the globe, always living at the edges, in refugee camps, squatting in a second home in London, and eventually landing in a Bay Area settlement where they finally, tentatively put down roots. The antagonist in Exit West is inhumanity itself, lured to ordinary lives by violence and desperation, and defeated by love, faith, and community. Annie Proulx, Close Range: Wyoming Stories Themes of isolation, hard-headedness, hazard, and failure pervade this 2000 collection by Annie Proulx. Her most famous story, “Brokeback Mountain,” reinvigorates Shane’s forbidden romance between its leading man and married Marion Starrett. When Proulx’s Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar meet as shepherds on a remote mountain and fall for each other, the Western horizon becomes a brief, lost paradise for them, only to close behind them once they return to society. Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer Viet Thanh Nguyen’s layered 2015 novel centers on an anonymous loner who is also a spy, a communist sympathizer living in Los Angeles at the end of the Vietnam War. A novel that simultaneously detonates American mythmaking about the East and shows the West through fresh eyes, The Sympathizer questions the matter of killing for “good reasons,” and the cost on the killer’s psyche. If Shane is a focused recounting of one American family’s fight for their land, The Sympathizer is its morally complex opposite, refusing to side with anyone, but revealing instead the multiplicity of desires, greed, and ideals behind our wars. Louise Erdrich, The Round House At first glance, a novel about an assault on the wife of a Native American judge, her family’s grief, and the sluggish justice system bears no resemblance to Shane. But dig deeper into Louise Erdrich’s devastating 2013 book, and you’ll see a boy, a crime, complex filial pride, a loner, personal retribution, and even a manly tearing-out-of-trees that inverts Shane’s famous stump removal scene. Most importantly, the narrator in both novels is still a child, who longs to believe in heroes that confront the world’s darkness head-on and do not shy from the consequences. Hernan Diaz, In the Distance Hernan Diaz’s magnetic 2017 debut reverses and shifts so many Western tropes, the novel is like Shane’s reflection on water, shadowed, splintered, and shimmering. Diaz’s central character, Håkan, leaves Sweden with his older brother in the 1850s to make a new life in America. But the boys lose each other and Håkan ends up on the wrong ship, landing in San Francisco. There, he decides to travel east, surviving hardship and encountering various figures and emblems of Manifest Destiny, heading in the opposite direction. In the Distance is an entertaining yarn, a harrowing journey, and a meditation on the mistakes and hopes of our history. *** View the full article

There is a magnificent bit in a Sherlock Holmes story, which—subconsciously in the beginning, I guess – gave me the inspiration for my first detective novel, Death Under a Little Sky. Holmes and Watson, that charming odd couple of nineteenth century fiction, are on a train, chewing over the details of some seemingly baffling case, when they get to talking about the landscape that speeds past outside their window. Watson is, typically, conventional in his regard for its beauty; Holmes is, typically, caustic, in his response, noting that no dark and smog-soaked rookery is more likely to present “a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside”. He goes on, as he so often does, to accentuate his argument: Look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser. In the British countryside, nobody can hear you scream. It’s an arresting notion, and one that worked its way into my mind, insidious, waiting for its moment to flower into an entire fictional setting. I never fail to marvel that Arthur Conan-Doyle managed effectively both to invent the genre of crime fiction and perfect it all at the same time, just as the Victorian period was meandering to its conclusion and the twentieth century was establishing itself. You can perhaps make an argument for Dickens in Bleak House, or his friend Wilkie Collins, give a respectful nod maybe to Edgar Allen Poe, but finally you must accept this: every detective book in the Western canon, for the next hundred and forty years or so, exists because of the puzzling, rewarding tales of an opium-addicted show-off, and his lumbering, blundering Boswell. The Golden Age that followed soon after further embedded the attractive concept of bloody crime and bloody-minded resolution. In England, strikingly, the chief practitioners of detective fiction were women: Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh. Perhaps only the first two are popular now, and perhaps only Agatha Christie truly survives in the brutal battle to linger in our otherwise amnesiac social memory. Sayers was the more brilliant writer, I think, the more fascinating woman, and her books about the relationship between Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane (the erstwhile murder suspect in Strong Poison) are the more satisfying to linger upon and re-read. It is odd that we call the genre both “crime fiction” and “detective fiction”. In fact, in this germinal stage, we might recognize that the detective is almost always more important than the criminal. Thus, those four authors are still known because of how well we know their bloodhound creations: Poirot and Marple, Wimsey, Campion, and Alleyn. We admire the characters’ foibles and mannerisms; we marvel at their superhuman powers of deduction. We are all besotted Watsons, when it comes right down to it, scratching our bewildered heads in bovine wonder at someone more intelligent than we are. Meanwhile, in America, the genre was branching off into a different direction: more masculine, violent, hard-boiled, urban. We got Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, the concept of the rugged loner, booze-soaked and brutalised: “down these mean streets a man must go”, said Chandler, “who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero, he is everything”. That hero—mostly male, but less so in recent years—has been with us, in books and TV and film, ever since. But an anatomy of such creative largess, a pedantic charting of each evolution and development, is ultimately an odious thing. Why try to enumerate every twist and turn of the genre’s history? Its brilliance is there in its very generosity, its ability to shift into different settings and cultures and countries. Think of where you can go if you confine yourself solely to stories about someone solving a crime: ancient Rome, with the charming, tousled-head Falco as imagined by Lindsey Davis; the green fields and trickling brooks of medieval Shrewsbury thanks to Ellis Peters; Inspector Montalbano’s fridge and its reheatable Sicilian cuisine; Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh; Michael Connelly’s Los Angeles; the strange underworld of Fred Vargas’s Paris; and on and on. If you were to read a detective book a week for the rest of your life, you would never run out of places in which to lose yourself. And, even after years of reading, you would probably still fail to spot the quiet-voiced, fifth-most-important character whom you don’t meet properly until the middle chapters, and who turns out to be the killer. So why did I feel I had to add my own worldly-wise detective, my own defined landscape, to this never-ending list? A good question, of course, and one I’ll come back to. But—this will turn out to be pertinent—why do I, why do we, love these books in the first place? My theory is a simple one. We live in a world—increasingly so—of mess and superfluity and interminable distraction. Our work and our home lives bleed together in infuriating, inexorable fashion. We are prisoners of the never-ending now. Someone said to me the other day this piece of devastating mordancy: “today is the slowest day of the rest of your life”. Everything gets quicker, more restless and relentless, and has since the day you were born. Detective fiction, in contradistinction, has shape, offers an answer; it concludes. The basic premise of all these stories is that something will go wrong, and then it will be explained, answered, put right. I don’t know about you, but I have always sought to find peace in fiction. At various points in my life, I have suffered from a sort of mental unease, gnawing anxiety, a sense of proximity to panic. I have found solace against my uncertainty in the certainty of books, especially detective books, relying upon their ability to provide me with resolution in an otherwise irresolute existence. I owe—in a real sense—my sanity to them. That did not mean I necessarily believed I would be able to add my own novel to the culture’s tottering and limitless stack. But one day, during the Covid pandemic, I started writing a story of a man whose world was wobbling, and who needed a fresh start, who wanted to escape the drudgery of the city and find some peace and repose in the “smiling and beautiful countryside”. He is an ex-policeman, Jake Jackson, and he inherits a place called Little Sky, in the middle of nowhere, beautiful and desolate, so far from civilisation that phones and the internet do not work. At the time I was locked down in a house with three children, so you can probably understand why the concept was so appealing. Little Sky is both deeply desirable—Jake has his own lake to swim in each morning—and deeply, sometimes frighteningly isolated. It is Sherlock Holmes’s warning made real. And Jake gets dragged into a mystery (of course he does) soon after he moves in, when bones are discovered that might link back to a death of a young immigrant woman some years before. I quickly realized that my embracing of the concept of isolation—which interested me anyway—meant I didn’t need to burden the narrative with any technology at all: Jake was uncontactable, and had no other means of learning what had happened than by walking and talking to people. We were back in the Golden Age, except he didn’t—unlike Poirot— even have a telephone. When he gets to know Livia, a local vet, they can only communicate by leaving bits of coloured cloth on a designated tree. A relationship develops from there. Detective fiction can be romantic, you see. After all, Dorothy Sayers’s novels are a long love story between Wimsey and Vane. Holmes and Watson love each other really, too. And I wanted my books to be mysterious and eerie, but also slightly sentimental as well. I want people to want to come back to Little Sky more than once. That’s another important point, and a good one to finish on. I honestly believe that one of the truest pleasures in life is discovering not just a book to love, but an entire set of them. My favourite fiction is, in the end, series fiction. I don’t just want a fleeting encounter with an important character, I want to get to know them, to have them as part of my life, whether it be Bosch or Morse or Cadfael or Brennan or Travis McGee or Miss Marple or Kinsey Millhone or whoever. Detective fiction at its best is something familiar, something personal, something reassuring. Anyway, Jake Jackson is sticking around for at least three more books, and that makes me very happy indeed. *** View the full article

The beauty of being asked to interview Chris McGinley about his new book Once These Hills was I knew I was going to read it anyway and knew I was going to read it as soon as it hit my hands. Chris is a writer of very specific passions—classic Appalachian literature and crime fiction—and he has married the two beautifully as I suspected he would. I spoke to him recently to find out just how he did it. WB: The first thing that struck me about your amazing book Once These Hills is that it’s two things at once. It’s a gripping crime novel dressed up in the clothes of a classic Appalachian yarn full of superstition, hard-living, haints, wildlife, mountain characters, and all the other trappings you’d expect. Is that the book you knew you wanted to write all along? CM: Hey Wesley, that’s a great question. In part, yes, I expected to write a tale with regional flavor, one involving many of the elements you mention. I’ve had an on-going relationship with Appalachian literature for over thirty years now – a love affair, if you will – and so I fully intended to write about mountain characters and the wilderness they inhabit, about spirits like haints, and about the trials of mountaineers – set around the late nineteenth century. In short, I wanted to write a historical novel. But I never expected to write a thriller where escaped convicts figure so crucially to the plot. Nor did I expect to create someone like Burr Hollis, the cruelest character I’ve ever imagined. But once I went down that road, the men on the lam became increasingly important to the narrative arc. In this sense, things developed organically, and what was intended to be a novel in the spirit of John Ehle or Wilma Dykeman, became more like a Sharyn McCrumb novel. (Or at least I hope it did!) The thoroughly criminal Burr Hollis allowed me to add tension at any point, too. In fact, it was liberating to discover this character. The novel bounces back and forth between the mayhem he single-handedly generates and the more domestic dramas of the hill clan. WB: Your book really is one of pairs and duality. Burr Hollis is a villain of the highest and harshest order but Lydia King is an equally, if not more commanding character who counterbalances his darkness in some ways. I suspect writing both of them set the pathways of your brain alight but was one more enjoyable than the other or could you even say? CM: Yes, Burr Hollis was conceived as a sort of moral antithesis to Lydia. Even the very structure of the novel reflects the duality you note, with one chapter set in Lydia’s world and one in Burr’s. Ultimately, the two spheres meet in the final chapters of the novel, and there this duality is reversed in certain respects. Of course, while Lydia is the moral foil to Burr, she also possesses skills necessary to hill people of the era. In a strange sense, she possesses some of the very same skills as Burr, and this is what makes things tense. As for the writing, Lydia was a delight to get onto the page, but writing Burr was at times even more rewarding, or fun, let’s say. I was careful to make sure he didn’t devolve into a villain stereotype, that the dialogue attributed to him, for example, emerges naturally, without a self-consciously “bad guy” affect. WB: Mark Powell is something of an icon in our region. In fact, Ron Rash called him “the best Appalachian novelist of his generation.” Powell in turn called Once These Hills “A brutally beautiful tale of violence and redemption, a page-turner with genuine depth.” What does praise like that form someone like Mark mean to you after all the meticulous work you put into crafting a book of this caliber? CM: Truthfully, when I read Mark Powell’s blurb, my eyes welled up. It means the world to me that such a talent, a writer whose work I absolutely love, would respond to the novel in such a way. In fact, thematically Once These Hills shares some ground with books like Lioness or The Dark Corner, tales in which environmental issues figure importantly. What I like about Powell’s work is that it’s not polemical. Ecological issues, and the related social issues they usher in and sustain, never threaten to undermine the story itself. I hope this is true of Once These Hills, too. And so, when Powell says that my book is a “page turner,” it really resonates with me. I was so pleased to see that my publisher (also the publisher of Powell’s newest) decided to use that blurb on the front cover. WB: While it reads rapidly, this is an exceptionally intricate and well-studied work. You’re a school teacher by trade. How long did it take you to go from writing that opening paragraph to signing off on a final edit? How long did you research this book and what was your writing process like? CM: The whole novel took about two years to write, start to finish. As you note, I’m a middle school teacher, a fact that allowed me to do much of the research during that first summer. (Funny, I wrote much of this book in my classroom after school hours!) My research came from regional scholars, people like Ron Eller, a historian who teaches at the University of Kentucky. Eller’s work on industrialization in Appalachia was central for me. There are many others like him, too, who have gifted us with works about the region and its long battle with extractive industries. Beyond the scholarly work, I became obsessed with photographs of nineteenth century timber camps, railroad workers, engines, sawmills, and machines generally. These images were like kernels of gold for the creation of the story. I imagined the lives of the people depicted in the photos, and thought about how the machines they operated affected them and their world. At the risk of sounding self-consciously poetic, I should say that I could hear the novel I wanted to write as I looked at these images. I could smell it, too—the smoke, the cut wood, the burning fuel, the sweat of the men . . . all of it. These historical photos, many from university archives, aided me tremendously. WB: You’re one of the most prolific readers of classic Appalachian fiction I know. I thought I was fairly knowledgeable until I saw some of the authors and books you’re reading. What are some underappreciated, lesser-known, Appalachian crime novels folks should be reading. CM: Wesley, I’m going to do my best to restrain myself! I could go on for pages with this question. I’d have to say, one of the most under-read novels set in Appalachia is Hubert Skidmore’s Hawk’s Nest (1941), a book about corporate crime and the brutal exploitation of human resources. It’s based on the construction of the tunnel at Hawk’s Nest, West Virginia, during the Depression. In the same vein are another pair of dark novels by Skidmore, one a sequel to the other, I Will Lift Up Mine Eyes (1936) and Heaven Came so Near (1938), also about industrialization and the corporate exploitation of mountain folk. Harriette Arnow’s Mountain Path (1936) is a novel that deals with moonshiners and dangerous mountain codes and feuds between families and factions—an incredibly tense read. Of course, people should read Silas House’s A Parchment of Leaves (2003), maybe not regarded as a crime novel per se, but there’s a murder in there that generates much of the action. It’s tense, tense, tense! Finally, there are the novels of Kentucky’s own Janice Holt Giles. (I cross myself when I say her name!) She wrote a range of titles that span different eras. Her eighteenth-century-set works The Kentuckians (1953) and Hannah Fowler (1956) are action-packed page turners, like her “frontier” novels, the best of which, I think, is Savanna (1961). These books are earthy and ribald, chock full of tension and violence. WB: You mentioned Silas House and he’s a pretty much a celebrity author in Kentucky at this point. Are there any other contemporary authors from Kentucky or the region who inspire you that more people should be reading? And I know what a nice guy you are so don’t say me. CM: One regional writer whom few people talk about is Sheila Kay Adams, from North Carolina. First and foremost a musician and traditional story-teller, she’s only written one novel at this point, My Old True Love, an achingly beautiful tale of love and violence set in Civil War North Carolina. I recommend it to everyone I know. Denise Giardina wrote two fantastic historical novels about coal mining in West Virginia, one a sort of sequel to the other, The Quiet Earth and Storming Heaven. These are hugely important to my writing. Of course, there’s Kentucky’s own Chris Offutt, whose last four novels have been crime stories. Check out his Mick Hardin series on Grove Press. Another Kentuckian, Crystal Wilkinson has penned a towering novel in The Birds of Opulence, a family drama so easy to read that the style belies its psychological complexity. Ann Pancake’s novels are spectacular, too. In particular, I love Strange as this Weather has Been. Interestingly, the publisher Shotgun Honey, out of Charleston, West Virginia, produces a good deal of regional crime writers, too many to note here, but check out their website. Two more writers who are hugely influential to me are Charles Dodd White, whose Lambs of Men is one of the greatest novels I’ve ever read, and Chris Holbrook, Appalachia’s finest story writer, for my money. Check out his collection, Upheaval. (OK, I won’t mention your excellent novel, Hillbilly Hustle, a true page turner! I read it in a day.) WB: You made one stylistic choice that always makes me curious. You created a fictional setting for your book, most notably Black Boar Mountain and the town of Queen’s Tooth. We know they’re in Kentucky generally, but I suspect you were thinking of somewhere specific. In your mind’s eye, where are Black Boar Mountain and Queen’s Tooth? CM: No one specific place, but the idea of a hill community looking down on a valley settlement comes from travelling around central Appalachia. In Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, and Tennessee, there’s always a hike to some overlook where one can see the valley below. Something in my mind’s eye when I wrote the book was the view from Chained Rock on Pine Mountain in Bell County, Kentucky, where there’s a perfect view of Pineville below. But really, there are dozens of such vistas in the region. Almost every state park with a mountain offers views of a valley or a valley town: Cooper’s Rock and Dolly Sods in West Virginia; Breaks Interstate Park, in Buchanan County, Virginia; and Lookout Mountain over Chattanooga. These (admittedly touristy) sites actually generated much of the visual orientation for the novel. But part of the geography for Once These Hills I gathered from novels I’ve read, like Wilma Dykeman’s The Tall Woman in which the main characters move to the Devil’s Brow up above the town. In fact, so many novels set in Appalachia create dichotomies between town and hillside, and these helped me construct the setting as much as any actual place. WB: What’s one question you were just certain people would ask you about ONCE THESE HILLS that nobody has asked yet? CM: No one has said a word about the sex scenes, and I thought people would have! The later one, especially, is really odd, and I thought people would remark on it. I hate to use the word “supernatural,” but there are “extra-human” elements there, let’s say. (Now I’m hoping I don’t win that “award” for worst sex scene of the year!) WB: Enough basking in the glow of this one. What’s next for you? CM: Well, I’m waiting to hear about a completed manuscript. This tale features the Vietnam Veteran character from two stories in Coal Black, Sheriff Curley Knott, who’s now rumbling about the hills trying to solve the murder of a young girl. And I’m almost done with my historical horror novel, set at a nun’s convent in late nineteenth-century western Massachusetts. In this one, nuns and postulants go to war with a massive wolverine-type animal, The Gulo. Fortunately, they have help in the form of a kick-ass French nun, a living saint if you will, who’s already done battle with demonic wolves and other creatures! I’m really trying hard to get a literary agent at this point, too, and that takes much time. (Anyone interested?) *** Chris McGinley is the author of the story collection, COAL BLACK (Shotgun Honey, 2019) and the LITERARY thriller ONCE THESE HILLS (SHOTGUN HONEY, 2023). He writes for Crimereads, Mystery Tribune, Reckon Review, and other forums. He lives with his wife in Lexington, KY where he teaches middle school English and Social Studies. View the full article

If you have ever wanted to know how it feels to snatch a painting from a museum wall, slide it under your shirt, and take off, then Michael Finkel’s, The Art Thief is for you. Finkel puts you in the scene and in the mind of Stephane Breistwieser, a man who stole more than 200 artworks from European museums and churches for a combined worth of $2 billion dollars. Breistwieser loved art, believed he could take care of it better than any museum, never sold a single piece, and lived with it until he couldn’t (a spoiler I will not disclose). At just over two-hundred-pages it’s a concise page-turner, a book for anyone interested in the criminal mind, with all the daring and chutzpah it takes to steal art, a true tale that will thrill you (but hopefully not inspire you)! You could say I’ve been obsessed with art crime for a long time. Not only because I went to art school and studied painting but because I have been creating forgeries and fakes, exact replicas of famous and semi-famous artworks, for art collectors for the past twenty years. “Legal” fakes and forgeries, that is, a side gig that led me to the study and psychology of art forgers, thieves, and the world of art crime which, after drugs and illegal arms, is the third largest criminal activity in the world (50,000-100,000 works of art stolen annually and only 5-10% ever recovered). Over the course of my writing career, I’ve interviewed members of the FBI’s Art Crime Team, an inspector from Scotland Yard’s Art and Antiques unit, and even modeled one of my main characters, John Washington Smith, the INTERPOL art analyst in The Lost Van Gogh and The Last Mona Lisa, after a retired INTERPOL analyst who generously shared some of his secrets. Art crime is a terrific subject, plot twist ready. Who can forget the 1990 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum theft of thirteen artworks, among them Manet, Degas, Vermeer, and Rembrandt, the works savagely cut from their frames, a tragic and expensive loss, $500 million to be exact. It’s unlikely the world will ever see these one-of-a-kind masterpieces again though you can watch the 4-part Netflix documentary This is a Robbery: the World’s Biggest Art Heist, which sheds light on the crime (an inside job? the Irish mob?) but without a solution. Thirty-one years later the Gardner Museum is still offering a $10 million reward, so if you have a lead, call me. The other books that gripped me this past year were research for my Van Gogh novel, many having to do with Nazi-looted art, the most comprehensive and premeditated art crime program ever perpetrated on humanity, Hitler planning to create his own museum, the Fuhermuseum, a proposed temple to (stolen) art, in his hometown of Linz, Austria. The war ended before he could realize his vision, but not before the Nazis had stolen an estimated one fifth of the art in Europe (more than 5 million paintings and objects, with at least 100,000 still not returned). Behind every one of these looted artworks is (at least) one death, something that separates the Nazis from your run of the mill art thief. I can’t say it’s fun reading, but compelling and essential to understanding the Nazis’ calculated art plunder, and the fact that the sale of these stolen artworks continues today. Many of the books kept me turning pages in stunned disbelief, while providing facts and data for my novel, which I will never forget. Among the best, Susan Ronald’s Hitler’s Art Thief and two by Jonathan Petropoulos, Goring’s Man in Paris and Faustian Bargain, taken together just about everything you ever wanted to know about Nazi art looting. For a more personal story of one man’s search for his family’s Nazi-looted art, The Orpheus Clock by Simon Goodman, is beautifully told and so heart wrenching it often had me in tears. A friend who spied my library—shelf after shelf of books on Hitler, Goring, Nazis, and stolen art—suggested I read a romantic comedy. Instead, I watched one, Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair, (1948), a Nazi romcom (you heard that right), filmed on location in post-war Berlin with Marlene Dietrich as a cabaret singer and possibly the former mistress of Hermann Göring or Joseph Goebbels. Wilder always said the tougher the material the more you’d better make them laugh, and I agree. Using Nazi art plunder in a thriller was a challenge, I have always believed if you want people to understand something don’t preach, entertain. I also rewatched one my favorite art heist movies, The Thomas Crown Affair (the 1999 remake) with Pierce Brosnan and the most brilliant, gorgeous, art insurance agent who ever graced the silver screen, Rene Russo’s Catherine Banning (upon whom I based my protagonist, Kate McKinnon, former cop turned art historian in The Death Artist). After that, I watched Woman in Gold, a top-notch Nazi art-restitution film (based on Anne-Marie O’Connor’s book The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt’s Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Block-Bauer). With the always brilliant Helen Mirren and Ryan Remolds as her devoted young lawyer battling a belligerent museum—and winning! You can see Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer (also called The Lady in Gold) on display at NY’s Neue Galerie. From there, it was a deep dive into all things Van Gogh. Irving Stone’s 1934 book Lust for Life, and the 1956 movie made from it, both fun and fascinating though filled with inaccuracies. It’s not that I’m against artistic license (I use it all the time) but I think it’s essential to let your readers know what is fact and what is fiction. Still, Kirk Douglas as Van Gogh is worth watching, whether he’s painting or going mad or raging at his artist frenemy Paul Gauguin (a pitch-perfect Anthony Quinn), their super-charged artistic relationship a hairsbreadth away from a full-blown love affair gone bad. Lust for Life does not deal with the ongoing mystery of Van Gogh’s death—unlike the staggering 800-page-plus biography, Van Gogh, The Life, by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, a fact-filled and engaging book that does delve into the crime surrounding Van Gogh’s death, something I believe and offer up in my novel for readers to decide. For a movie version of that crime, check out Julian Schnabel’s, At Eternity’s Gate, with Willem Defoe as a credible Van Gogh, and Oscar Isaac as Gauguin. Their scenes together are too few, but artist/filmmaker Schnabel knows how to recreate the act of painting on screen so believably and sensually it will make you want to pick up a paintbrush. For more Willem Dafoe, there’s Inside, a wildly claustrophobic film about an art thief who gets trapped in the lavish but empty apartment he is trying to rob. It’s a descent into artistic hell Robinson Crusoe style, with graphic scenes of Dafoe foraging for food and drink that border on torture porn. Where’s Friday when you need him? The film’s tag line should read, Art Crime Doesn’t Pay. Not always the case, and clearly, I enjoy putting it on the page. *** View the full article

What is it about the work of Patricia Highsmith that attracts some readers as powerfully as it repels others? I’m in the first group: I fell under the spell of her weird, chilling, compelling voice the first time I read her. Wondering what all the fuss was about, I went to the bookstore and randomly bought The Price of Salt (which was later made into the movie Carol), not knowing that it was an anomalous choice as it was more a love story—forbidden love, at the time—than the kind of crime story Highsmith became famous for. The power of the storytelling lay in the eerie clarity of her narrative voice and a fierce willingness to push her characters over all kinds of edges. Next, I read Strangers on a Train, and there it was, the alchemy of that voice as it wormed its way through the protagonist’s rock-and-a-hard-place dilemma. Highsmith generally leans hard into the villain’s point of view, then brings you deep into his (I would soon recognize that her protagonists were almost always men) consciousness and makes you root for him, maybe. More a literary sorceress than stylist, she traps you in the mind of a person you’d never want to meet in reality. Sarah Weinman stated it perfectly in her recent article on Highsmith: “Her concepts are daring, her portrayals of men in the throes of personality disorder and psychopathic leanings are equally repulsive and propulsive, and there is enough sublimated autobiography in her work that searching out the facts of her life reveals all manner of infuriating contradictions.” When I set out to write my novel Invisible Woman, I wanted to do two things at once: show the unfolding dilemma of a woman trapped between fraught personal history as it collides with sensational breaking news and tap into the cool, eerie, icky deliciousness of Highsmith’s bleak yet urgent narrative voice. I couldn’t resist the temptation to try my hand at a modern Highsmith novel, from a woman’s point of view. By setting my story in the early upheavals of the #MeToo movement, I’d be able to infuse my protagonist with more juice, more velocity, than would have been possible in Highsmith’s time. Back then, there was little social or moral infrastructure to support the believability of a female protagonist who could take action as ruthlessly as her male counterparts—and get away with it. In the early and mid-twentieth century, when Highsmith was living and writing, it was generally not considered interesting to write about a woman’s life (at least, not in crime novels). It wasn’t interesting because, well, who cared? Women were passive sidekicks. Women lacked agency. At best, they were wisecracking dames. A female character could not be a protagonist because a protagonist had to be a hero, and a hero had to be male, because…well, partly because society had capitulated to that idea at some point in the past and continued to spend enormous amounts of psychic energy upholding it, and partly because it was men sitting behind the desks making the decisions about what interested them. When I was a young woman making my way in the world and finding my voice as a writer in the nineteen eighties, even my protagonists tended to be male. I sensed that if I wrote about women, I wouldn’t get published. For women, that kind of looped thinking was our noose. Generations would break out of it occasionally then thoughtlessly let it slip back around our necks. Finally, when publishers realized that the great American readership was powered by women, they created a category called “Women’s Fiction” (ugh) with a subset of books called “Chick Lit” (ugh) but despite those demeaning monikers, writers went to town. Female protagonists were brought full-scale to the party with flare and introduced to a hungry readership that lapped them up. By the early two-thousands, when I started writing crime fiction, my women always held the weapon at the end. But not until Invisible Woman did I explore the terrain of a female protagonist’s story from within the prism of the societal pressures at work on her life. Her thinking is her motivation. Her motivation is her action. Her action is an act of self as well as an act of social expression in the context of her historical time. What (I hope) makes it Highsmithian is that the outcome isn’t good or right or moral, but it is inevitable. When a woman’s mind and heart are twisted by distorted social dictates, the outcome may not be pretty. When a woman’s mind and heart are twisted by distorted social dictates, the outcome may not be pretty. Writing a Highsmith-inspired novel from a female perspective meant allowing my protagonist all the passionate distortions an epic midcentury male hero, or antihero, would enjoy—and deploy. He’d deploy his strongest feelings and worst instincts against the people and system that wronged him. To capture the Highsmith spirit, and the spirit of our times, my protagonist would need to be honest and raw even if it made her unpleasant or dangerous or both. She’d have to feel her feelings, think her thoughts and drop the smile that had plugged a cauldron of conflicted feelings so long that they’d simmered to a slow boil. Unplugged, all that steam had no choice but to rush out with consequence. I prepared by gathering six Highsmith novels I’d never read, took notes along the way, and finally dove into a recent biography, The Talented Miss Highsmith. If you read it, brace yourself, and do your best to separate the artist from the art. She wasn’t a smiler nor was she nice. Highsmith herself might have been her own perfect, distorted protagonist if she’d been writing today, minus the buried bodies. By the time I set to work on Invisible Woman, Ms. Highsmith had also wormed her way into my protagonist Joni’s mind and story—she reads these same novels as her own story picks up steam and Highsmith’s voice ignites dangerous sparks in her imagination and sets her on her path to deciding, on her own terms, what the ending would be. If you want to read along with Joni as her story unfolds, here’s the list. *** View the full article

You hold in your hands one of Otto Penzler’s American Mystery Classics, a series that resurrects out-of-print gems in handsomely designed new editions. I owe this series a great debt because it introduced me to the work of one of my favorite mystery authors, John Dickson Carr. Carr was an American but lived and worked in England during the 1930s. Outlandishly prolific, he quickly built a body of work that placed him in the pantheon of what is now known as the “golden age of detective fiction.” This isn’t the brute poetry of Hammett or the seedy sexual decay of Cain, no Spades or Marlowes or gumshoes packing gats. This is murder as a gentleman’s game, the fair play of master puzzle-smiths, or to quote Anthony Shaffer quoting Philip Guedalla, “the normal recreation of noble minds.” This is Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ellery Queen, G.K. Chesterton. Carr is less well known today than those contemporaries, and that deserves to change, because he is one of the very best. The first quality that blows your hair back in any of Carr’s novels is so fundamental that it’s easy to take it for granted: beyond the plotting or the puzzling, beyond the mystery itself, first and foremost the man is just one hell of a writer. Like walking into a well-put-together room, when you’re in the hands of a good writer you can just feel it. His prose is genteel without being fussy, brisk but rich, funny while keeping your feet in the dirt, and all of it woven with that effortless breeze of step that we as readers recognize and happily fall in behind. To quote Sayers, no slouch herself: “Mr. Carr can lead us away from the small, artificial, brightly-lit stage of the ordinary detective plot into the menace of outer darkness. He can create atmosphere with an adjective, alarm with an allusion, or delight with a rollicking absurdity. In short, he can write.” That menace she mentions is palpable in Carr’s work. Tonally his books lilt towards the gothic horror of Poe, often turning from cozy warmth to chilling terror on a dime. Yes, you’ll get the comforting burnished warmth of libraries and club chairs, but it’s when the story blows the windows open and the candles out that Carr really shines. Hag’s Nook, another of my favorites, centers on the events of a dark stormy night in a crumbling ancient prison. What could have been a hoary trope of a setting is in Carr’s hands a sensual feast of rotting, rat-infested terror, so effective that, though we know the essential cozy moral compass of the genre will not be betrayed, at moments our sense of security slips away, leaving the thrill of “oh god what if this gets truly nasty?” Tonally his books lilt towards the gothic horror of Poe, often turning from cozy warmth to chilling terror on a dime. The Problem of the Wire Cage has a relatively genteel setting, an English estate with an adjoining tennis court. The clean lines and manicured safety of a gentleman’s game. But it has images of unsettling power that have stuck in my mind as much as any gothic dungeon. Carr begins it with a storm. Violent disruption. The electric smell of lightning in the air and loamy wild petrichor. With a few brush, strokes the blackened clouds frame pastoral green, the driving brutality of the rain and wind cuts the structured idyll, and we feel the invasion of something dangerous and primal, all the more effective for its contrast with the comforting. In that way, Carr’s similarity to Poe goes beyond style. Although the resolution will always solve the crime, turn on the lights and restore order, it’s obvious that that is not where Carr’s heart lies. In fact, to risk sacrilege here, though Carr is one of the premiere puzzle constructors of his age and his denouements are always surprising and satisfying, those final chapters are consistently my least favorite part of his books. The beating heart of any John Dickson Carr tale is the delicious terror of the unsolvable, the tactile details of the unexplainable and horrific, and the implication that the monster is just outside your window. All your careful structure and cozy comforts will not protect you from the darkness. But let’s talk about puzzles. Carr is known as a master of a very particular subset of detective fiction, the “locked room mystery.” In the most literal sense this is exactly what it sounds like: a corpse is found alone in a locked room, knife in his back, but he is alone and there are no ways in our out, bah dah dum. With such a constrained premise there are only a few real options to work with, usually some combination of ingenious contraption and manipulated timeline. It’s the mystery version of a chess puzzle, with just enough pieces on the board and no more, a few predetermined moves at your disposal. If you can stand another metaphor, it’s also the mystery equivalent of a margarita pizza—possibly the purest test of a pizza artisan’s skill in that its simplicity leaves nothing to hide behind. The most famous of Carr’s locked room mysteries is his masterpiece The Hollow Man, titled The Three Coffins in the United States, which features a little meta mini-lecture from the detective on the solving of locked room crimes. It’s creepy and ingenious and delightful and, if you’re new to Carr and enjoy what you read here, it should probably be your next book. But even an author as ingenious as Carr could not work in rooms his whole life and most of his books open up the locked room concept to its (in my opinion) much more fun cousin, the “impossible crime.” This brings us back to our present volume, The Problem of the Wire Cage. A man is dead, strangled in the center of a sandy tennis court after a rain, with just his own footprints leading to his final resting spot. It’s as clean and beautiful a set-up as you could ask for. Graphic and perfectly clear, it presents the impossible challenge to the reader in one single striking image. This might be why Anthony Shaffer begins his film adaptation of Sleuth with fictional mystery writer Andrew Wyke (modeled to some degree on Carr) narrating the denouement of his latest novel with this exact same premise. The film opens with Wyke (played by Laurence Olivier) standing in a hedge maze, listening to his dictation recording of this passage: “But since you appear to know so much, sir,” continued the inspector humbly, “I wonder if you would explain how the murderer managed to leave the body of his victim in the middle of the tennis court and effect his escape without leaving any tracks behind him in the red dust. Frankly, sir, we in the Police Force are just plain baffled.” Sleuth is one of my favorite films. I can recite the rest of this scene verbatim and I put a reference to a case involving a tennis champ into my own film Knives Out as a tribute, so I was greatly relieved that Shaffer did not spoil the actual solution to Wire Cage. He does, however, take great pleasure in spoiling the idea that cozy detective fiction is the “normal recreation of noble minds.” The locked-room or impossible-crime mystery has its detractors. Some find the solutions by their very nature to be overly theatrical, fussy, and belabored. Very often the crime is impossible in a way that implies some supernatural element must have been involved and, for children of the 1970s, this can have the unfortunate effect of evoking two words every mystery writer dreads… “Scooby Doo.” I wouldn’t go that far. But look. I do get it. I can appreciate the fun of an ingenious puzzle, especially when an artist of Carr’s caliber is crafting it. But these types of set-ups have much in common with magic tricks and there will inevitably be something slightly anticlimactic and tawdry when the mechanism behind even (or especially) the best trick is revealed. So why is Carr, the foremost practitioner of this method of mystery, one of my favorite authors? To put it simply: his best work never mistakes puzzles for story[/oullquote] So why is Carr, the foremost practitioner of this method of mystery, one of my favorite authors? To put it simply: his best work never mistakes puzzles for story. And he’s a damn good storyteller. His books may be known for their puzzles, but they’re powered by the narrative engine and driving pace of a Hitchcock thriller. The Problem of the Wire Cage is a fantastic example of this. I’ll tread lightly here so as not to spoil any of the book’s delights, but in the very first pages Carr yanks you right in with a love triangle, complimenting the rising rainstorm with jealous violence. Then, even more crucially, when the mystery of the body in the middle of the tennis court is revealed, Carr does not rely on the detective’s investigation to hold the reader’s attention. Instead, he takes the two characters we care about the most and snares them into a web of guilt and culpability. Suddenly we are not thinking out a puzzle but flipping pages on the edge of our seats to see how these two could possibly get out of it. I sincerely hope by this point you’ve skipped ahead and just started reading the damned book but, for the patient ones still with me, I’d like to end with an appreciation of Dr. Gideon Fell. Carr created several detectives over his vast oeuvre, but the most famous are Sir Henry Merrivale and Dr. Gideon Fell. Fell features in this book, and he deserves to be ranked with Poirot and Holmes, Marple and Wolfe and Wimsey and whoever else you’d put in the pantheon. A wheezingly massive man who walks with two canes, with an appetite for beer, cigars, and eccentric knowledge, by turns blustery and sly, blunt and humane, he can be a bull in a china shop one moment, then vanish into the shadows the next. Like all great golden age sleuths, you underestimate him at your peril. Carr modeled him on one of his own heroes, G.K. Chesterton, who authored (among many other things) the Father Brown mysteries. Besides the physical resemblance, Fell reflects Chesterton’s earthy morality. Father Brown’s skill as an amateur detective lies in a loving intimacy, not with the perfectly divine, but the painfully flawed and human. We read the same knowing compassion into Gideon Fell though, if I had to choose one of the two to go out for beers with, Fell would be much more fun. Enjoy the book! If you’re familiar with Carr’s work, you’re in for some fresh delights. If this is your introduction to the man, I hope it’s the first of many, and that you spread the gospel far and wide. Thanks are owed to Otto Penzler for the opportunity to write this introduction, and for publishing the wonderful American Mystery Classics series. I’d highly recommend the previous Carr volumes, in which you will find illuminating introductions from authors and luminaries such as Charles Todd, Michael Dirda, Tom Mead, and Otto himself. Rian Johnson Paris May 2023 __________________________________ John Dickson Carr, The Problem of the Wire Cage (American Mystery Classics) View the full article

Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * James Grippando, Goodbye Girl (Harper) “This is the eighteenth Swyteck novel since The Pardon (1994), and it’s just as good as the rest. Grippando keeps coming up with complex and timely cases, and this one is first-rate.” –Booklist Amy Pease, Northwoods (Atria/Emily Bestler) “Outstanding…Pease’s sharp dialogue and well-rounded characters enrich the core mystery with an authentic representation of the everyday struggles of small-town Americans. Admirers of Eli Cranor will eagerly await more from this gifted writer.” –Publishers Weekly Katia Lief, Invisible Women (Atlantic Monthly) “Part domestic thriller, part psychological mystery, this is a tight, well-paced novel, and it hangs on the complex and flawed character of Joni herself. Rediscovering Patricia Highsmith’s novels, Joni begins to lean into the darkness of her own soul.” –Kirkus Reviews Shubnum Khan, The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years (Viking) “Khan’s prose is lush and lovely, her pacing skillful, and she successfully weaves a complex plot with a large cast. A ghost story, a love story, a mystery—this seductive novel has it all.” –Kirkus Maria Hummel, Goldenseal (Counterpoint) “In this taut, tense, and layered novel, Hummel deftly examines the lives of two flawed women against the backdrop of the upheavals of the twentieth century.” –Booklist Duane Swierczynski, California Bear (Mulholland) “Swierczynski is brilliant at fooling even savvy readers, and his jaw-dropping twists never compromise his exceptional character development. This is a tour de force.” –Publishers Weekly Karl Marlantes, Cold Victory (Grove) “Marlantes moves from the jungles of Vietnam to the spectral tundra of a very cold Cold War–era Finland . . . better than Tom Clancy when it comes to the human element, but he’s similarly fascinated by militaria and historical detail.” –Kirkus Reviews Araminta Hall, One of the Good Guys (Gillian Flynn Books) “I’ve been a fan of Araminta’s from the start; she is one of the most daring and intriguing writers working today. Her writing is so addictive, her characters so sharply realized. One of the Good Guys is a resonant, razor-laced, and dangerously glittering novel.” –Gillian Flynn Vicky Delany, The Sign of the Four Spirits (Crooked Lane) “Brilliantly executed . . . Will appeal to golden age mystery fans and Holmes fans alike.” –Publishers Weekly Kat Ailes, The Expectant Detectives (Minotaur) “Witty, bright, and with an unexpected twist ending, Ailes’ debut mystery will appeal to fans of British comedies and cozy mysteries.” –Booklist View the full article

Kinshasa – capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Formerly Léopoldville under the bad days of Belgian colonialism, now one of the fastest growing megacities in the world with 16 million citizens and rising quickly – the most populous city in Africa, ahead of Lagos and Cairo. Diamonds, and rare earths all feature now as key sectors of the Congo’s economy and essential to our modern lives but susceptible to the instability of the DRC. And a long history of featuring in crime writing… Let’s start with Joseph Conrad and the classic Heart of Darkness (1899). Conrad was briefly a steamboat captain in the Belgian Congo in the 1890s and the place and the actions of the European colonialists there scarred him. So he wrote what’s been called the biggest short book of all time – Heart of Darkness. Steamer captain Marlow is given a text by Kurtz, an ivory trader working on a trading station far up the river, who has “gone native” and is the object of Marlow’s expedition. The crime – colonialism, racism, the creation of a society where moral compasses go crazy. Of course it influenced Coppola’s Apocalypse Now later. You must have read it – but if you haven’t, stop reading now and go and buy a copy. Also now, not classically a crime novel but a writer who features in Crime and the City regularly, Graham Greene’s A Burnt-Out Case (1961). A Congo leper colony, an architect hiding from his own celebrity. Again the theme is that in the Congo former certainties fall away. Similar themes, but with more obvert crime, coalesce in French crime writing legend Georges Simenon’s African Trio (1979) – in order: Talatala, Tropic Moon and Aboard the Aquitaine. Talatala, is a love triangle in the Belgian Congo that goes wrong; Tropic Moon is the story of Timar, an expatriate Frenchman who falls for another expat, Adele, who is accused of murder; Aboard the Aquitaine follows a French ocean liner returning from the Congo to Europe and the odd characters abroad. And there’s a random Congo connection to Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle who was so appalled by the condition in the so-called Congo Free State, controlled by Belgium, and labelled a “rubber regime” by Conan Doyle that he wanted to use his fame to expose the human rights abuses in the country. The Crime of the Congo (1909) was described by the British press at the time as ‘the most powerful indictment yet launched against the Belgian rulers of this bloodstained colony.’ Conrad, Greene, Simenon, Conan Doyle – all big names. But we also must include some more recent Kinshasa/DRC set novels. American writer Tamar Myers was born and raised among Christian missionaries in the Congo and that’s where she has set her Belgian Congo Mystery Series. Though Myers is better known for her recipe based cosy mysteries and also books about the Pennsylvania Amish community, this is an all-Africa-set series of four books. The books all feature Amanda, an American missionary who arrives in the Belgian Congo to run a missionary guest house. The first book in the series is The Witch Doctor’s Wife (2009) followed by The Head Hunter’s Daughter (2011), The Boy Who Stole the Leopard’s Spots (2012) and finally The Girl Who Married an Eagle (2022). Moving from the Belgian Congo to the independence era, William G Collins’s Murder in the Congo (2017) is set in 1966 and tells the story of Pete, one of President Mobutu’s guards, the controversial Congolese politician and military officer who was the president of Zaire (was the name of the Democratic Republic of the Congo from 1965 to 1997). Pete makes a discovery in the Congo River which forces him to flee to Kinshasa. James Rollins’s Kingdom of Bones (2022) is a book in the author’s Sigma Force, scientific warriors, series – in fact the sixteenth of 17 books! Commander Gray Pierce and Sigma Force is called in after a United Nations relief team find a Congolese village full of catatonic residents. Sigma Force must battle the changes in nature as well as finding out who is messing with ecology in the Congo. The late Michael Crichton was another writer that wrote about so many places, including the DRC. In Congo (1980) it’s all about the country’s controversial diamond mines and a mythical city – and an American expedition led by Karen Ross, who’s desperate to find her husband and recover the data he found before he disappeared. But there are other teams trying to get there first, and the way is strewn with life-threatening dangers – plane crashes, civil wars and a dormant volcano awoken by dormant explosives. More Rider Haggard perhaps than a crime novel but certainly a thriller and became a Hollywood movie in 1995. Matthew Palmer’s The American Mission (2014) is billed as a diplomatic thriller. Alex Gaines has been involved in Africa for years but is broken by witnessing a massacre in a Darfur refugee camp. Now, it’s 2009 and he is US consul in Conakry, Guinea and considering retirement until he’s offered the post of Political Counselor at the American embassy in the DRC. There he becomes involved in a conspiracy by a US-based conglomerate, Consolidated Mining, enmeshed in the violence-ridden minerals trade in the Eastern Congo. Shades of corporate espionage meets the world of Leonardo DiCaprio’s 2006 movie Blood Diamond. Peter Lewenstein’s Bukavu Blues (2022) is the first in what may well be a new series featuring human rights defender Patrice Le Congo. Le Congo is tired of the constant violence he sees in Kinshasa life. When schoolteacher, Aurélia Mukunda, turns to him for help after a mutilated body is found in a village, he can’t say no. Lawless tin mines and dangerous encounters with rebel groups and renegade army units along with a series of gruesome murders in Bakavu (a city in eastern DRC) soon follow. Gritty, but a great character we’re sure to hear more of. And finally, a graphic crime thriller. Everybody knows the legendary 1974 Ali-Foreman “Rumble in the Jungle” boxing match. Belgian author Thierry Bellefroid’s and Congolese cartoonist Baruti Kandolo Lilela, (aka Barly Baruti) have produced Chaos in Kinshasa (2023) where a Harlem gangster takes a trip to Central Africa, gets involved in a plot to murder Mobutu and ends up trawling through the seedy underground of Zaire. A Cold-War-era thriller set against the backdrop of a landmark moment in sports history. Kinshasa-based Baruti is the co-founder of the Atelier de Création et de l’Initiation à l’Art (Creative Workshop for an Initiation to Art) to encourage talented youth in Kinshasa. Bellefroid works for the Belgian television company, RTB, where he presents every week Sous Couverture, the RTB literary magazine. –Featured image: Kinshasa, by Johnnathan Tshibangu View the full article

When The Fury of Beijing is published at the start of the new year, it will be the 19th book in the Ava Lee series—15 featuring Ava, and 4 featuring her mentor Uncle. They comprise about 7,000 pages, and 1,500,00 words. Not too shabby for what began with just her name and a couple of sentences bouncing around in my head. Fury will also be the last book in the series, and I thought I’d take this opportunity to write about how it began, and how it somehow made it as far as it did. The Ava journey started in July, 2009 and coincided with me having some major surgery. It wasn’t something I’d planned before the surgery, but then post-op as I was being wheeled to my room an orderly had said to me, “If you see any nuns don’t speak to them.” “Why?” I’d asked. “Your room is in the old wing of the hospital, and the nuns are ghosts who come to visit you if they think you are going to die.” I was highly medicated and that undoubtedly contributed to my reaction—which was total fear. I spent the night seeing shadows and hearing swirling skirts, and as I lay on my bed, I thought about all of the things I hadn’t done in my life that I wanted to do. Writing a novel, or at least trying to, was at the top of the list, and I promised myself that if I got out there alive, I was going to give it a go. A few days later—still somewhat medicated—I sat down at my computer, wrote the name AVA LEE at the top of a page, and wrote this: “When the phone rang, Ava woke with a start. She looked at the bedside clock. It was just past 3 a.m. “Shit,” she said softly. She checked the incoming number and saw it was blocked. Wherever the call originated, she was sure it was somewhere in Asia, and the caller was either ignorant about the time difference or just too desperate to care.” It set the tone I wanted, and somehow survived my editor’s pen. I am a seat-of-the-pants writer, and have never outlined a book, or created character studies. Ava, for example, came to me fully formed. I didn’t make a list of names, or sketch her life, she was just there for me, and without having to think about it, I somehow knew everything about her. Once I started writing, I wrote every day, and even when not at the computer I couldn’t get Ava or the story out of my head. It was an enormously happy time. I felt completely liberated, the work flowed, and I knew very quickly that I was going to finish the book. Whether it was going to be any good or not was for someone else to decide. About half-way through that first book, though, something strange happened—I found myself thinking of a plot for a second book. I don’t know where the idea came from; it was just there, and I built a reference to it into the first book. When I finished that first Ava, I began writing the second on the same day. Then about half-way through it, I had plot ideas for a third and a fourth book. I didn’t question why that was happening, I was simply grateful that it did, and it has never really stopped. For example, I was writing the third book when I suddenly realized how the sixth was going to end, and soon after I had a story arc that extended to at least ten. And I just kept writing every day, the joy of it never abating. It took me eight months to write the first four books. I slowed down a bit after that—mainly because of other demands on my time, such as literary events—but I’ve still managed to average a book and a half a year. It is one thing, though, to write that many books, and quite another to keep the books fresh. Good plots are part of that, of course, but maintaining interest in your characters I thought was just as important. So I decided early on to do everything I could not to be repetitive, and Ava’s life and the people in it were an important part of that. Ava becomes increasingly more experienced, and her life changes in meaningful ways. I surrounded her with a large group of characters that I found interesting; some come and go from book to book; some leave entirely; and some even die. There are also new people constantly being introduced, and sometimes they surprise me. For example, when Ava met Lau Lau in the Goddess of Yanai, my plan was for her to have at the most two conversations with him, and then he’d disappear from her life. Instead, as I was writing the second conversation, I found Ava being drawn to him, and suddenly he became a character in five more books, and in some of them he was prominent. My rule of thumb is—when I stumble onto a character who intrigues me, I run with them; when I’m writing about one who bores me, I dump them. Another thing I had going for me in terms of keeping the books fresh was the shifting locales. With only a few exceptions I have been to them all—and often for extended periods of time. That said, I go to great lengths not to write a travel guide. What I try to convey is the sense of a place, and what makes it different based on my own experiences and reactions. For example, the pothole issue and daily power outages in Georgetown, Guyana both found their way into The Water Rat of Wanchai. The dogfish plant in Northern Denmark that infuses Ava’s clothes with urine odor became a recurring theme in The Wild Beasts of Wuhan. And, the temple in Surabaya that is a place of worship for three different religions, made an appearance in The Scottish Banker of Surabaya. In all cases, these were things that I experienced and was fascinated by. As I was traveling and working in places like those, I made a point of trying to learn as much could about the history and culture of the people who resided there. I spent more time in Hong Kong that anywhere else, and aside from reading about it, I made many friends there, was welcomed into their homes, and was given a glimpse of the family dynamics that I utilized in the Ava books. I also attended funerals and weddings (including the wedding of a man taking a second wife), and again these experiences found their way into the books. Another truth, and it’s far more bittersweet, is that as I wrote earlier, Fury is the last Ava Lee book. Every series has a natural conclusion and I think this is it. Ava’s friends have been avenged. There are no pressing issues for her to tackle. Hong Kong, and most of China for that matter, have become increasingly complex places for her to venture, and difficult for me to write about. And at home in Toronto, Ava is in a happy place with friends she trusts and the woman she loves. What more could I ask for her? *** View the full article

Reissued for the first time this century, John Dickson Carr’s The Problem of the Wire Cage is an atmospheric and amusing Golden Age mystery with a memorable puzzle at its center. Dickson Carr is famous for his puzzling “impossible crime” plots in which corpses are discovered in scenarios that seem to lack any logical explanation. Among all of Carr’s ingenious crime scenes, the present case is one of the best known: a dead man is found strangled in the middle of a clay tennis court, just after a storm. In the damp dirt, there is one set of footsteps—his own—leading back to the grass; the court is otherwise untouched. This edition from American Mystery Classics has a new introduction by Oscar-nominated writer-director Rian Johnson. Rian Johnson made his directorial debut with the neo-noir mystery film Brick (2005), then received recognition for writing and directing the science-fiction thriller Looper (2012), followed by writing and directing the blockbuster Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017), which grossed over a billion dollars. He returned to the mystery genre with Knives Out (2019) and its sequel Glass Onion (2022), which earned him Academy Award nominations for Best Original Screenplay and Best Adapted Screenplay, respectively. Johnson also directed three of the most lauded episodes of the series Breaking Bad (2008–2013): “Ozymandias,” “Fly,” and “Fifty-One.” In 2023, he released the TV series Poker Face, which he co-created with Natasha Lyonne for Peacock. Johnson was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2023. Our editor Olivia Rutigliano sat down with Johnson to talk about whodunnits, detectives, movies, books, ice cream, Columbo, Sondheim, if Poker Face exists within the Knives Out cinematic universe, and how Daniel Craig got Benoit Blanc’s voice just right. This interview has been edited for concision and clarity. Olivia Rutigliano: I showed my parents Looper last night. I put it on and my dad did not fall asleep, which is the biggest achievement because we started at 9 p.m. Rian Johnson: As someone of ‘dad age’ myself, that’s a big, big win. OR: He was really excited. RJ: That’s awesome. OR: My mom was sitting next to me the whole time going, ‘that’s not Joseph Gordon-Levitt is it? He looks like Bruce Willis.’ And I was like, ‘Wow, they really made Joseph Gordon-Levitt look like Bruce Willis.’ My first question for you is… how did you guys do that? RJ: There’s a brilliant makeup artist, Kazu Hiro, who we worked with. He is incredible. I forget what Joe had worked on with him before, but recently he has done all the work with Gary Oldman in Darkest Hour. He did the makeup for Bradley Cooper for Maestro recently. But he also does fine art. For a while, he retired from movies and was just doing sculpture. He’s a genius. OR: And Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s acting… the way he was smiling with the corner of his mouth like Bruce Willis… RJ: Yeah, and the voice. Bruce recorded himself saying some of Joe’s lines so that he could study it. But also those prosthetics meant that Joe was in the chair for like 3 hours every morning. And he couldn’t eat! Because if he ate physical food, the lips would fall off. So he had to eat his meals through a straw. OR: I was confident it was prosthetics, but then the part where Emily Blunt goes to kiss him—and she kisses him really forcefully—made me think, ‘maybe it’s VFX!’ RJ: We only got a few takes of that! My joke was that they were going to do the kissing scene and come away and she was going to look like Bruce Willis, was going to be wearing his lips, at some point. Yeah, that was a high stress moment. We were like, ‘we only got a couple of takes of this but this is going to start to go bad.’ But it held up pretty well, actually. OR: It was awesome. It looked so good. Immediately after watching Looper, I was like, ‘Oh man, I miss David Addison! Thank God Moonlighting is streaming now!” RJ: [My wife] Karina and I just started re-watching Moonlighting, actually! We’re in Season Two. OR: Isn’t it so good?” RJ: It’s so good! And in Season Two it really starts finding its footing. Yeah, yeah, it’s so fun. OR: I spent like all my money on the DVD set. RJ: Because it takes such wild swings, though, it’s a mixed bag. You can hit one where you’re like, ‘oh, boy.’ OR: There’s one, like the third episode of Season One… RJ: The train? OR: No… Cybill Shepherd’s old friend turns out to be the murderer… and they’re in a factory and it’s not good! But then you build toward the Shakespeare episode and it’s crazy! RJ: And the black and white flashback episode. OR: Yes, the noir one! RJ: The noir one is amazing. And, storytelling wise, it’s brilliant how in the dream thing they get to pay off the will-they-or-won’t-they but not with David and Maddie. OR: To shift a little bit toward books… John Dickson Carr! I’m very interested in how you came to discover John Dickson Carr. RJ: Well, it was indirectly through Otto [Penzler], because my wife and I always stay in this area when we’re in New York, and at one point I was just looking around, are there any bookstores here? Years and years ago! I saw the Mysterious Bookshop. And since then, every time I visit, I’ve just kind of gone into the shop and browsed. And the Mysterious Press bookshelf that they have is always one of the first places I’ll look. And I randomly picked up… The Crooked Hinge… no, it was The Mad Hatter Murders, because the cover was so cool. I don’t think I had even read The Hollow Man/The Three Coffins. I started with The Mad Hatter and I was completely enamored with it. And that drew me into the world of John Dickson Carr. It was Otto doing his series of books, although I didn’t know it at the time. I was enamored with this series of books. And then it was after Knives Out came out that when I was going in the shop, I think Ryan (who works in the shop) was the first guy to say hello. And then I started to get to know the guys and Otto. OR: Yeah, they’re a wonderful crew. RJ: Lovely, lovely folks, man. By the way, I should say that I’m not a scholar… I’m an enthusiast. OR: Well, I read your introduction to The Problem of the Wire Cage, so you could have fooled me! RJ: Ha, I know a lot about a little. I let go of trying to create a character and just wrote to the needs of the story, knowing that I would cast, hopefully, a great actor who would take it… and give it its own thing OR: My friend and I were talking about John Dickson Carr, and we were like, ‘I think this is the push we needed for the JDC renaissance… Rian Johnson’s going to kick Carr into the big time! There’s the tennis star reference in Knives Out and now this… we’re on our way!’ RJ: I grew up reading Agatha Christie. That was kind of the extent. Even when I sat down to write Knives Out, that was kind of the breadth of my mystery knowledge. And I feel like Knives Out… first of all, my experience was so good making that movie. It was so much fun, and I got very excited about the genre. And suddenly over the past five years, I’m like, ‘Oh, I’ve got to read everything I can now!’ And finally, for the first time, I read the complete Sherlock Holmes, and the Father Brown books, and now I’m going back and reading Dorothy Sayers. I’m reading all the stuff I probably should have read before I wrote it, now. OR: Knives Out is so wonderful. I saw it three times in the period before it even had its wide release. And it was one of the first reviews I wrote for CrimeReads. Benoit Blanc is such a fun character. I’m so interested in how you arrived at that personality—how he emerged. RJ: Man, I’m really glad you like the movie that much. It’s interesting… when I started writing it, I had in my head that I’d write a real character for the detective. And that kind of messed me up. I found that I was writing him as an accumulation of quirks. Terrible stuff. He literally had an eye patch. And at some point, I realized ‘this is just kind of silly, this is becoming a Halloween costume.’ So what my actual approach to it was: I gave him the thing of having a Southern accent, and then I let go of any notion of creating a strange character and just wrote him completely straight, and wrote him to the needs of the story. He kind of found… I guess an ethos throughout the course of it, sort of a moral center, which was the main thing that I grabbed onto in terms of his relationship with Marta. And I found a very subtle way of being… there is the very slight pompousness of Poirot in there, just because I find that hilarious. But overall, I let go of trying to create a character and just wrote to the needs of the story, knowing that I would cast, hopefully, a great actor who would take it and not change what’s on the page, but just through embodying it, bring it to life in a way that would give it its own thing. And that’s what happened. Honestly, the challenge now (especially because I’m in the middle of writing the third movie) is for me to try and still do that and not to write to the voice I have in my head from making those first two films. Which is similar with Natasha and Poker Face. You can get yourself into trouble as a writer if you try writing what you think her voice sounds like, right? Because then it’s a photocopy of a photocopy. With Benoit, it’s largely just trying to find the basic character stuff. What does he care about? Where is his heart at in the story? What is he interested in? What gets me excited? And just write it pretty straight. OR: I have two questions that are forking off from this. The first is, how did the casting process work? I mean, Daniel Craig is the perfect embodiment of this character. Did you try a bunch of different actors or was it kismet? RJ: Oh, no. I mean, the casting process went for a while. It’s hard to get a big movie star to say yes! OR I can only imagine! RJ: It’s really tough, because they’re all so busy! They all have commitments going way deep. And so did Daniel. We didn’t approach him for the part at first because he was doing James Bond. I think it was Spectre. But we didn’t even go to him because we knew he had commitments. I had met him a few times before, but I didn’t think he was available. And then there was something that delayed the shooting of the Bond movie for like three months and we had a window and I was on vacation with Karina and I got a call like, ‘you’re getting on a plane in New York to meet Daniel Craig.’ We were at this beach resort, and I literally got on a motorboat. I was waving to my wife like, ‘I’ll be back in a day!’ I felt like James Bond. And I flew up to New York, met Daniel, and it was on! We jumped on it. It happened really quick. But then once Daniel was cast, we did a lot of work between the two of us trying to find the accent. [There were] a lot of references sent back and forth. And, you know, ‘is it Faulkner?’ It sounds like it should be Faulkner but then you listen to how Faulkner actually sounded, and you realize, ‘no that’s not it.’ The one thing that I knew was I wanted it to be… not even subtle, but I wanted to be sonorous. I wanted it to be pleasant to listen to, as opposed to twanging. At some point, Shelby Foote came up. He’s a historian who is in a lot of the Ken Burns documentaries, and I forget where Shelby is actually from… is it Mississippi? But he has that kind of honeyed, you-could-just-listen-to-him-for-hours type of thing. So that was a big reference that we finally found. OR: He’s so good at accents. The first time I saw Daniel Craig was in Road to Perdition. And he’s— RJ: —terrifying in that! OR: He’s so incredible. RJ: He’s so good. He can do anything. He really convinces. He is a toolbox that’s like Mary Poppins’s carpet bag. Yeah. I really feel that he can do anything at all. OR: He’s fantastic. My second question is: I know that Natasha Leone was more involved in the creation of Poker Face. RJ: Yeah. OR: So how was the creation of Charlie Cale then, with Natasha on board? Did you collaborate on the character before writing the script? I saw Russian Doll and I was like… ‘I think this is it! I think this is somebody who can actually be a Peter Falk and anchor a show like this!’ RJ: The whole thing with Natasha started because I had kicking around in my head the idea of doing a TV show-TV show. Like, not a prestige-y eight-hour movie, but the type of stuff that I grew up watching as a kid. Rockford Files, Columbo, A-Team, Quantum Leap, you know, Highway to Heaven. And the one thing that all of those shows or their successors have in common is a charismatic lead character. And all of them had very good mystery writing… but all of them, for the most part, are actually hangout shows. Same thing with Moonlighting. You want to hang out with these characters. OR: You just want to be there! RJ: Yeah, you just want to be there. It’s fun to be there. And that’s tough to find. So, Karina had actually gotten to be friends with Natasha because Natasha was a fan of her podcast. And I saw Russian Doll and I was like… ‘I think this is it! I think this is somebody who can actually be a Peter Falk and anchor a show like this!’ So, I had dinner with Natasha, and I told her exactly that. I didn’t have anything more than that. And we started kicking ideas around. Over that dinner that we came up with this thing of: what if she’s a human lie detector? That could be interesting in these moral ways. And we go, ‘okay, great, we’ll think about it.’ And we went off and then the pandemic happened, basically, and I wrote the pilot script off on my own. And I think Natasha thought it was one of those Hollywood things like… ‘Yeah, let’s work together babe,’ and nothing ever happens. Which happens a lot. So, I think she was actually very surprised when I dropped the script into her lap. And she was like, ‘Oh, you actually wrote it?’ She was into it and that’s how it started. OR: Yeah, that’s awesome. And I mean, congratulations. Poker Face is so wonderful. I just introduced a new friend to it. I watch Columbo with my grandmother every Saturday; it’s the most comfortable show in the world and Poker Face really captures that. You want to hang out with everyone, but you also want to take down everything the detective is saying as life advice. It’s such a triumph in many ways. And it’s also like Columbo in that it’s got a murderer’s row of guest stars! RJ: That was the other huge, huge thing! It was interesting with the casting… this is also true about Columbo… it’s not about getting big A-list stars but it’s about getting stars that you are genuinely happy when they show up on the screen. And giving them a chance to maybe do something they haven’t quite done before. And it’s hard because, like I said, it’s hard getting movie stars into things. But I think it was helped by the unique nature of these—where it’s not like a little guest part where they’re playing patient number seven or whatever. Genuinely, it’s their episode. Man, I still think about the people that we were able to rope into it. I’m still pretty amazed. OR: I mean, when I’m watching Columbo with my grandma, I call my mom and dad to be like, ‘it’s Dick Van Dyke! It’s James Mason! Myrna Loy! And of course he got John Cassavetes, it makes so much sense, they’re friends.’ RJ: And Ida Lupino and Johnny Cash, holy shit! OR: And that’s what I was doing with Poker Face. I was like, ‘Oh my God, Tim Meadows and Ellen Barkin!’ RJ; And you also realize with those Columbo stars, those folks were around and they were working. That’s the other thing. They were like in the studio! OR: They were on the lot! RJ: Yeah, they were on the lot. So, there’s an expediency to it and a workmanlike vibe. You know, maybe not Cassavetes. I feel like that was a phone call. OR: Yeah, that was a phone call. That was a Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Noah Segan call. RJ: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And… TV-TV! I felt myself craving that recently. OR: So is there a chance you worked on Glass Onion and Poker Face around the same time? RJ: Oh, yeah. There’s a very good chance. Yeah, it was an absolutely insane year that I was honestly kind of destroyed by, at the end. In a good way? OR: Thank you… but I’m sorry. RJ: It’s a good problem to have. But, yeah, we were doing the writers room for Poker Face at the same time I was editing Glass Onion, and then we were basically shooting Poker Face as I was releasing Glass Onion. So it lined up in a way where it was manageable… but they were both happening at once. And poor Natasha was releasing Season Two of Russian Doll while we were shooting Poker Face and she was just working her ass off during the week and on her one day off, driving down to the city to do press all day. She was a champion. OR: No wonder Charlie Cale is so tired! RJ: Method acting! OR: This is the most ludicrous question, but does Poker Face exist in the Benoit Blanc-Knives Out-Glass Onion universe? RJ: You know, this is funny because I had to do the math on this! Because in the opening of Glass Onion, she’s on the zoom call with Sondheim and Angela Lansbury and Kareem! OR: Kareem! RJ: But she’s on it as Natasha… yeah, so, in the world of Knives Out, Benoit Blanc is friends with Natasha Lyonne, who when we zoomed with her, was in her trailer shooting Poker Face. Yeah, that’s actually when we recorded the zoom. So in the world of Knives Out, he’s friends with Natasha Lyonne, who’s making a show called Poker Face! We could have an episode of Poker Face on a TV in the background, and it would work! OR: And Kareem seems like the coolest man in the world. RJ: Sweetest dude in the world! I mean, when I went to film those things, I literally sat down with him with my laptop. Same with Angela! I went to her house. I was just sitting there with the laptop and then talking them through this weird thing. They were both so sweet. And Sondheim, I zoomed with. He was up in his house. OR: Amazing. One thing that you’ve done that means so much to all the people who love movies is that you’ve captured these epic stars and given them a final credit that’s really meaningful and special. RJ: I feel very lucky. I feel very lucky to have gotten to work with all these people. OR: Christopher Plummer and Maximilian Schell! RJ: Oh, Maximilian Schell. He was so cool and I was a young, green filmmaker and he was so incredibly kind and sweet. And he played that crazy role where he’s dressed up in this wild costume. And we were shooting it in Prague and he said, ‘I want to walk around the city in this costume just to see, okay?’ And so we took a walk together through the streets of Prague with him dressed in this outrageous get up with an eyepatch with a jewel on it. OR: Topkapi 2.0. RJ: Oh my god, Topkapi. So, so good. OR: And thank you for doing this and including Sondheim, because also Last of Sheila is one of the great undersung mysteries. RJ: Have you read the play that he wrote? OR: No, I haven’t! RJ: It’s interesting that the one play, the straight play that he wrote, was a murder mystery! But Last of Sheila, my god! Obviously Glass Onion owes a lot to Last of Sheila. OR: It’s stamped right at the beginning. Like, ‘oh, there’s Sondheim. We know what’s coming.’ There are so many other fun cameos, too, in Glass Onion. I’m so curious about Ethan Hawke showing up for 5 seconds. RJ: Yeah, we knew we wanted to get someone really fun for that part. And it was very specific to this movie, all these celebrity cameos. This isn’t going to happen every time. It felt right for the Miles Braun universe. I had met [Ethan] a few times, but he was in Budapest with Oscar Isaac shooting that Marvel show, so he happened to be a flight away. We basically offered him, like, ‘come down for the weekend, we’ll put your family up in this big resort, we’ll shoot one day, it’ll be fun.’ He got to come to our kickoff party that Daniel threw. He was really gracious. He came down for a day and did this weird little part and then was gone. And it was at the beginning of the shoot, so, like a shaman, he blessed the shoot. He gave a blessing and then he stepped off and we never saw him again. OR: And, you know, I have to ask about Hugh Grant. That’s a cute cameo. The bread making, the pandemic… RJ: We didn’t know if we were going to be able to get him! He was my first choice. If I can picture Benoit Blanc with anyone, it’s Hugh Grant. It was very sweet of him. OR: So the pile of books next to Benoit Blanc’s bathtub. He’s doing puzzles, he’s bored… RJ: Cain’s Jawbone, yeah. OR: Exactly. So, the Cain’s Jawbone inclusion was so interesting because Natasha Leone is right there. And I started watching Poker Face not long after, and immediately started to wonder about the order and organization of Poker Face—if each episode is a standalone taking place, Fugitive or Quantum Leap style in a different city, if it all had to be presented sequentially, or if you can shuffle all the episodes like Cain’s Jawbone and a different story or a version will emerge. And then at the end, a detail completely debunked my theory. RJ: Well, you can shuffle most of it… I mean, there is that little montage at the end, flipping through the year. I guess that kind of pins it. The reality is that, before we shot them, we did shuffle some of them. The intent is that you can just drop in and watch anything anywhere and enjoy it, get a full meal. If you kind of know the deal about Charlie Cale—she has this ability and she’s on the road, blah, blah, blah—then you can skip ahead. And that was really intentional and that’s going back again to watching reruns of these procedural shows as a kid, which were not done in any kind of order, which would hop around and you never knew what you were going to get! And you could just plunk down and watch it, an hour of TV, and be done. OR: A Columbo rerun on a Saturday night! So, your first feature was Brick. By the way, our Editor-in-Chief of CrimeReads is a huge fan of Brick. And Brick plays with expectations of neo-noir. But now you’ve been spending time with gentlemen sleuths… but also the crappy Columbo-inflected P.I.-ish type— RJ: It’s funny that they’re all under the banner of ‘mystery.’ But mystery fans know these are such different genres. OR: And heists and con artists, too. Your oeuvre is like the greatest hits of everything that appears on our site! I’m so interested in what’s drawn you to that umbrella of crime stories and those different subgenres. RJ: I think that the only way that I know how to figure out what to do next is to follow my nose… like Joseph Campbell says, follow your bliss. You just have to go after whatever the shiniest object is to you in that moment. I guess the answer is just that I really love all of that stuff. And I grew up watching it, and I’ve always been intrigued by it. OR: The best genres, says the CrimeReads employee! RJ: Yeah, you’re a little biased, that’s fair. OR: You’ve dabbled in all the different, major crime personalities… hitmen, con artists, et cetera, et cetera…. RJ: Oh, that’s true, with Looper! I didn’t think of that. OR: Yeah! The Rian Johnson bingo card is being assembled! A carnival of crime subgenres! So, besides gentlemen sleuths, is there a particular archetype that you feel begs additional exploration? RJ: In terms of something that I’ve done that would be fun to do more of? OR: Yeah… Brick is a neo-noir, and that’s your most hardboiled movie. Are there more, you know, forties-style, fast talking sleuths you’d be interested in exploring? Or the Brothers Bloom are con artists but is there a big Ocean’s Eleven style heist in you? RJ: Yeah, I don’t have, in my head, like a checklist. But it’s a good question… I don’t know, I guess the best way I can explain it is: for me, the process of wanting to work on something comes from having kind of two things that are sort of separate until they’re not. And one of them is the heart of the story and what it’s actually about. Or it could be a character, it could be an emotion, it could be a question that I’m wrestling with. The other thing is the genre element, which is the kind of thing that you described. And I don’t really get rolling until I have two of these things that fit together like teeth of gears and work with each other. And so in that way, in a vacuum, I’m not excited about doing specific genre elements. It’s only when I realize, ‘oh, I can put this engine in this car.’ OR: Speaking of heists and capers, if you were casting a heist movie, do you have any ideas of who you would want on the crew? RJ: In the cast? Or on the crew? OR: In the cast of the crew? RJ: I mean, I have a thousand actors that I want to work with. That’s one of the fun things about these Benoit Blanc movies… although it makes the cast that I work with very sad because at the end of the process of putting it out, they’re all like, ‘are you sure you can’t have a recurring character?’ I think Jamie Lee Curtis is still upset with me. OR: She is so great! We’re in a Jamie Lee Curtis renaissance. She’s killing it in The Bear right now, too. RJ: She’s so good. And she’s such an amazing person. You meet her and she’s an absolutely wonderful human being. So, I have so many actors I work with. For me, when I’m writing (this will be kind of a boring answer to a fun question), I try not to think about actors generally because I feel like that’s kind of unfair, because that means I’m just kind of duplicating their voice. And then I probably won’t get them anyway. So, I don’t know. Yeah, I try to just write the characters. And I work with my casting director Mary Vernieu to figure out, okay, who would be fun to see in this part? OR: I mean, John Darnielle! RJ: He’s the sweetest! He’s the coolest! I mean, I’ve known that guy a long time. It’s fun because I started out being the biggest super fan of The Mountain Goats, and now I’ve known him for years and he is an incredible person. I felt so happy roping him into being in the Poker Face episode. OR: Have you read his new novel? RJ: Yeah, it’s fantastic. OR: He’s so cool. I was so excited to see him in Poker Face. Who wrote the songs for that episode? RJ: John did! And he collaborated with a guy who’s a serious metal writer [Jamey Jasta]. But John is a big metal guy. I asked him ‘do you want to be in this episode?’ And he’s like, ‘okay.’ And I go, ‘oh, wait a minute, can you act?’ And he sent me a video of him doing a Shakespeare monologue. ‘Alright, you’re hired.’ OR: Was there an episode of Poker Face that was particularly memorable (by directing it or writing it)? Or, if you’ve got one episode of Poker Face that you could show an alien, what would it be? RJ: I mean, the thing is, they’re all so different. It’s a tricky thing because they’re different in terms of tone. Mm hmm. So, for instance, I love and had such a great experience working with Joe on the ‘Escape from Shit Mountain’ episode, but if you watched that and then watched the community theater episode, you would think, ‘is this even the same show?’ And I love them both so much. So, it’s hard for me. I think just in terms of my experience, I also had a great experience shooting Episode Two, getting to work with Hong Chau, who I wanted to work with for years. And Colton Ryan and some other great young actors. But… I think [‘Escape from Shit Mountain’] was the first time Joe and I had worked on a set together since Looper, so that was really special. I have a thousand actors that I want to work with. That’s one of the fun things about these Benoit Blanc movies OR: Oh yeah, because in Knives Out, he only does the little voiceover, the fake TV show thing? RJ: Yeah, and in Star Wars he did an alien voice. But it hadn’t been since Looper that we worked on a set together. So that was a really special experience. OR: What have you seen recently that you like? What’s your best movie or TV show of the year or something you’re really excited about? And I have the same question about books. RJ: What have I enjoyed recently? Oh, you know what I saw that I thought was absolutely fantastic. Have you seen Anatomy of a Fall? OR: Yes! RJ: Yeah, I loved it. Absolutely loved it. And talk about another subgenre of mystery that I’m fascinated with and would love to do something with someday: the courtroom thriller! I love a good courtroom thriller and this was, on every level: the performances, the story, the filmmaking. Yeah, that’s one of my favorites of the year. That was incredible. OR: I thought the flashbacks were done so perfectly. It was just the right balance. RJ: It was, man. But mostly Karina and I, we go on Criterion and look for pre-code movies that are under 90 minutes. That’s our jam. I think it’s probably rolled off the channel by now, but there was an Ida Lupino movie called Ladies in Retirement. OR: I don’t even know this one. RJ: It was so fun. It was so good. I’ve been in a kind of gothic, misty-moors type vibe. And this is just absolutely delightful. OR: I’m really hoping we get an Ida Lupino renaissance as well. She’s amazing. RJ: She had an incredible career. And in this movie, she’s like 23 years old but she has this gravity that’s amazing. And the book question. What did I think of what I’ve read recently? Oh, actually because my short-term memory is so bad, I keep a diary. I did love Rebecca, which I read for the first time. Oh, you know what I read that was fascinating? I got really interested in spiritualism, and so I read Houdini’s book, A Magician Among the Spirits, which was amazing. OR: Did you read Daniel Stashower’s biography of Arthur Conan Doyle? Because if you haven’t, you are in for a treat. It’s called Teller of Tales. And it won the Edgar for best biography in 1999. He describes two scenes that were so unbelievable. The first is that Arthur Conan Doyle, spiritualist, arranged a séance for himself, after he died, at the Royal Albert Hall. And it also details a showdown between Harry Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle. They fought about spiritualism! RJ: Oh, my God, I know! Houdini talks about it in his book. I’m fascinated by the séance that Conan Doyle set up for Houdini with his mother. And then afterwards, he’s like, ‘my mother didn’t speak English.’ But it’s a fact that they still remained friends even though there was this difference. OR: What are you currently reading right now? RJ: I’m just finishing up The Razor’s Edge. I got really into Maugham this year. I read The Painted Veil and then I read the big one, Of Human Bondage. Yes. Which is absolutely, absolutely incredible. He’s an amazing writer. I always have like eight audiobooks going at once. I’m an audiobook freak. But I’ve been trying to discipline myself to do actual reading. I’m reading Jamaica Inn right now and I’m excited to get into the short stories. Mostly I’m writing and writing, which doesn’t leave a lot of room for reading, unfortunately. OR: I was reacquainted with the joy of pleasure reading as soon as I handed in my dissertation. RJ: So nice, right? To have time off and actually be able to read? And you need it. You need to fill the well back up. You’ve got to recharge. OR: No, it’s true. I mean, I don’t know anything anymore. I put everything I know into a 200-page thing and now I’ve got to learn new stuff. And do other things. RJ: I make ice cream also. OR: You make ice cream? RJ: Yeah, it’s a hobby of mine. OR: That’s fascinating. RJ: I haven’t done it recently, but I really got into it for a while. We have this big Italian ice cream maker that can freeze anything. And so I’ve made all kinds of wacky ones… I made a cigar ice cream once! When I was developing the Star Wars movie, I brought the ice cream maker up to San Francisco with me, and that’s how I got on the good side of all the Lucasfilm folks: I would bring in wacky flavors at our end-of-the-week party every week. I collect weird hobbies. I’ll get on different tracks. I’ve always been into photography and recently I got into large format photography, like eight by ten negatives, with the big camera with the bellows and you put the sheet over your head. And then developing and contact printing them myself, which is a cool trip. OR: What year is the make of that camera? RJ: It’s a new camera, actually. But it’s not like you can buy it off the shelf like you buy a Nikon. You buy the camera body itself which is made of wood from a guy in Arizona who makes them. And then you have to get a plate for the lens, custom made. And then get a custom ground glass. But there’s a network of people, because it’s not a very big community of people who do this. You get on the phone, you talk to the guy, and you kind of figure it out and then you Paypal him and he sends you this beautiful work of art that is this camera. And so, I love getting into weird, esoteric hobbies. But I’m also kind of a dilettante, I guess. I don’t stick with any long enough to truly become an expert. I hop and taste test. OR: Yeah, well, the unexamined life is not worth living. RJ: Hey! OR: Hey, cheers! Cheers to that! __________________________________ John Dickson Carr, The Problem of the Wire Cage (American Mystery Classics) View the full article

When I first came up with the idea for Five Bad Deeds, I didn’t imagine telling the story from so many different points of view. I had my main character, Ellen Walsh, all fleshed out, and Five Bad Deeds was supposed to be very much her story. However, best laid plans often go awry. See, at its core, Five Bad Deeds is a story about perception – how we perceive ourselves, how others perceive us, and the occasional yawning gap between those two things. Therefore, it was important that Ellen’s character, and her actions, be seen through the lens of a number of different people – her family, friends and neighbours (and among those, her sworn enemy). Many crime novels use dual perspectives, flipping back and forth between two central characters. Five Bad Deeds uses seven (although Ellen’s remains the central POV around which all the others rotate). Below is a list of five other novels featuring a veritable buffet of different perspectives! Into The Water – Paula Hawkins There’s absolutely no denying this is one complex novel, featuring eleven different narrators and numerous plot lines. The story centres around the murder of single mum, Nel Abbot, who is found dead in the river that runs through the town (a town harbouring big secrets). While eleven POVs may sound hard to keep track of, the novel is so well-crafted, the stories building and interlocking so perfectly, I found it easy and enjoyable to spend time inside so many heads. Kill Show – Daniel Sweren-Becker A very recent read. This story centres on the disappearance of teenager, Sara Parcell, who disappears one morning on her way to school – so far, so standard. However, this book is anything but conventional, told as it is in interview format, with key players from the investigation – the police, the journalists, the family, the friends, the armchair detectives – all having their say about what happened to Sara and the part they played. Documentary-style narratives can be divisive, but I challenge anyone not to be drawn into this twisty, propulsive tale. Unravelling Oliver – Liz Nugent I read this book on a six-hour flight, barely able to tear my eyes away. It’s certainly a challenging read, unflinching it’s depiction of domestic violence while at the same time intelligently examining the reasons why an abuser might become the way they are. The book opens with Oliver essentially admitting to what he is, then we travel back in time to meet a number of different people who encountered him throughout his life (from a neglected young boy to the adult sociopath he develops into), and it slowly becomes clear that the signs were always there. A difficult read, for sure, but an exceptional 360-degree character study. The Teacher – Katerina Diamond Diamond burst onto the UK crime scene with this original debut – the tagline, ‘not for the faint-hearted’ was absolutely spot on. This is a multiple POV story (fourteen!) about the secrets that lie within an exclusive private school, and the extent to which a brutal killer (and I mean brutal) will go to avenge past wrongs. To go too much into the structure would risk giving away spoilers, but let’s just say, you shouldn’t get too attached to any of the characters (as they might not survive!) One Good Turn – Kate Atkinson. Atkinson brings her trademark wit and unique understanding of people’s flaws and foibles to this complex crime romp, sparked by a violent road rage incident at the Edinburgh Festival. While Jackson Brodie returns as the main protagonist, this is also the story of Martin, Gloria, Archie and Hamish, all witnesses to the incident, plus many, many more. While the cast of characters is huge, each is brilliantly drawn. Very much an ensemble piece. *** View the full article

My last book about the mafia, Mob Rules: What the Mafia Can Teach the Legitimate Businessman, was an international bestseller translated into 20 languages. Because of the book’s global appeal, I was invited by the German media conglomerate Axel Springer to speak at their annual retreat for editors, being held at the Hotel Villa Athena in Agrigento, Sicily. The first evening, I met an older gentleman who introduced himself as George. We struck up an enjoyable conversation that centered on our mutual love of history, and, at some point, George said to me: “I would like to publish your next book.” This softly spoken man, who conversed with me as if we had known each other forever, was Lord Weidenfeld, one of the most talented and influential book publishers of the 20th century. George’s long, illustrious career had a tragic start. Days after the Nazis entered Austria, his father was arrested by Brown Shirt auxiliaries. He was eventually released, but George’s grandmothers were not as lucky; both were gassed to death in the Holocaust. Nineteen-year-old George fled Vienna for London, where the Brits welcomed him and hired him at the British Broadcasting Corporation as a radio monitor. After the war, George and Nigel Nicolson started their own publishing firm, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, and, for decades to come, George was well known for matching ideas with authors, exactly what he was doing with me as we conversed on that fateful day. The following afternoon, George and I met for lunch along with his charming wife, Lady Annabelle. George suggested that I write a history of the mafia. Annabelle – who was educated in a convent boarding school where she became an avid reader – helped us flesh out the idea, and her brilliant input cannot be overstated. As I travelled home from Sicily, I assessed the size and scope of the project and wondered if I was getting myself in over my head; a proper history of the mafia would take many years to research and write, and the mafia’s genesis, in and of itself, seemed an unsolvable riddle. The commitment was daunting, so I put it aside and pursued other endeavors until my dear friend and goombah, Bruce Ramer, and his lovely wife, Madeline, were attending an event in Germany, where they happened upon George and Annabelle. Bruce ducked out of the event to call me from Germany and tell me that George was asking about me and the status of the book. I saw this chance occurrence as a reinforcement of the first encounter in Sicily, and I began to write a history that evolved into a trilogy and would chain me to my desk for the next seven years, eventually completing what George and Annabelle had known I was capable of as we sat overlooking the ruins of Agrigento. Throughout his long career, George published authors such as Truman Capote, Henry Miller, Gore Vidal, and Norman Mailer, while personally pitching ideas to legendary historians such as Eric Hobsbawm, Richard Pipes, Michael Grant, Arnold Toynbee, Lady Elizabeth Longford, and Lady Antonia Fraser. George also published the memoirs of de Gaulle, Tito, Pope John Paul II, Lyndon Johnson, and Moshe Dayan, as well as life-altering books such as The Double Helix by James Watson. As I understand it, I was the last author George personally commissioned before sadly passing on in 2016. I am forever grateful to him for giving me this opportunity and for placing a self-taught ex-convict in the company of the literary titans mentioned above. *** View the full article

Cornell Woolrich published Black Alibi in 1942. His tenth book overall, it was the third in his series of “Black” novels. The Bride Wore Black (1940), later adapted into a film by Francois Truffaut, led the sequence off, succeeded by The Black Curtain (1941), The Black Angel (1943), The Black Path of Fear (1944), and Rendezvous in Black (1948). None of the six books has a continuity with any of the others, but each in different ways mines the dark psychological territory a reader expects from Woolrich. Black Alibi wastes no time in its setup. We are in Ciudad Real, “the third largest city south of the Panama Canal,” and in the first chapter, titled The Alibi, casino and nightclub performer Kiki Walker, from Detroit, is getting dressed in her hotel suite. Her press agent, a guy named Jerry Manning, shows up with a black jaguar on a leash. After Kiki’s initial fright, Jerry assures her that the big cat is domesticated and that he has borrowed it from its owner for her benefit. Imagine what attention she will garner, the publicity she will get, if she walks down the main city boulevard with it. She is skeptical, but he insists that if she walks it calmly down the avenue, past the cafes and passersby, she will make a splash. When they have driven to the right location, he lets her out of the car and hands her the leash, and as Jerry said, her promenade down the sidewalk draws oohs and ahhs. All goes well. That is, until either a barking dog nearby or a piece of meat thrown by someone at the jaguar startles the feline. The jaguar tears the leash free of Kiki’s grip and takes off down the street. It bolts down an alley. A panicked search for it ensues, but despite the alley it entered seeming to have no escape route, the jaguar is not found. Danger will now lurk in the city until the animal is caught. End of chapter one. Five chapters follow. Kiki Walker, with whom the story opened, disappears. From this point on, Black Alibi has a plot that unfolds with utter simplicity, but its structure is somewhat unusual, anticipating a type of structure that would become popular decades later, though in films more than in novels. Here is what happens, chapter by chapter. Chapter 2: We meet teenager Theresa Delgado. Like everyone in Ciudad Real, she knows that a jaguar is loose somewhere in the city. At night, in their modest hut, her mother orders her to walk to the store and get some charcoal they need. Theresa resists, but her mother kicks her outside to force her to go, and on the terrifying trip, Theresa is killed. Chapter 3: Here is Conchita Contreras, young and pretty. At dusk, under the pretext of wanting to put flowers on her father’s grave, she leaves her comfortable house and goes to the local cemetery to meet her secret boyfriend. But she and her boyfriend miss each other, and she gets murdered in the graveyard. Chapter 4: We are with Clo-Clo. She’s a woman in her twenties, not a prostitute but someone who makes her money flirting with men and keeping them company in bars. After a typical busy night for her, which has its twists and turns in various drinking establishments, she encounters something (or someone) on a dark, empty street that leaves her dead. Chapter 5: Sally O’Keefe and her friend Marjorie King ignore the story going around of a “man-eating something or other” that’s loose and take a horse and carriage ride to a park outside the city. After their ride and much suspense, the night ends with Marjorie asking for the police because Sally got “torn to pieces”. Chapter 6: Jerry Manning has been helping the police investigate the killings. He, Marjorie King, and the grieving boyfriend of Conchita Contreras execute a bait and trap plan in the park where Sally O’Keefe died. Marjorie is the bait. The killer comes and the boyfriend shoots the murderer. Jerry’s theory, as opposed to what the police have been saying, is proven right. The main culprit is not an escaped jaguar but a human being. We have been dealing with a deranged, psycho-sexual killer. As Jerry explains, “The jaguar was the spark. The spark came along and bang! All over the place. Every large city has dozens of his kind. Fortunately, most of them never blow a fuse. One in a hundred gets started off, and then you have it! Jack the Ripper in London. Bluebeard in France. That ax killer – what was his name? – in Germany.” Woolrich has written a proto-serial killer novel, but it is also as if he peered into the future and came back from it having watched giallo films from the 1960s and 70s. Between the first chapter and the denouement, Black Alibi consists of almost nothing but a series of elaborate set pieces ending with a woman stalked and murdered. Newly introduced characters are developed for us to know them slightly; that’s it. We care a little about them, no more. Then the killer eliminates them. About the police inspector leading the case, Robles, we know next to nothing other than his professional function, and Manning is not drawn in great depth. So we have characters well-sketched but briefly met, and we find no complexity in the episodic plot. All this means that the prose itself, the effects achieved through the writing, has to shoulder the burden of keeping the reader engaged. But Woolrich pulls it off; he maintains his grip through the tension and horror he evokes in the set pieces. In every chapter, as a future victim comes closer to her ultimate fate, the writing is highly descriptive. Woolrich emphasizes what the pursued woman hears, feels, sees, and imagines she sees. He is adept at creating suspense through prolongation, at slowing things down for the reader whenever a character’s terror mounts. And the reader, in his mind’s eye, can see what’s unfolding with a stark clarity. No wonder so many filmmakers over the years have chosen to adapt Woolrich’s works for the screen. Here’s Theresa Delgado scared, as she passes through a short tunnel: “They weren’t eyes were they – other eyes? So steadily maintaining their twoness, their equidistance, their taut, stretched-out suggestion of wicked peering – No, of course not. How could they be? What would eyes be doing in here, and – whose would they be anyway, and – Just don’t let them be; don’t think they are; if you think they aren’t, they won’t be. Only light glinting from the wetted projection of two small roughnesses, two unevenesses in the stonework, side by side, that was all.” And from Conchita Contrares’ scene in the graveyard: “The trees were invisible against the black sky. But under them, and far too visible, the white of the monuments and the markers made blurred gray ghost shapes here and there. An angel poised on one toe threatened to spring out at her from ambush, seize her about the neck with both arms tightly entwined, bring her down. She screamed, and shied aside, and nearly fell, then went floundering on again. A wind seemed to come sighing up out of the earth around her, damp and moldy with the aroma of long-buried things. It wasn’t just static, it seemed to pursue her, threading through the trees, winding down the path after her, moaning, trying to claim her for its own. The pathway under her was just a gray ribbon, an indistinct tape, stretched across the dark. It never seemed to end, it never would end – ” You could say there’s some purple in these sentences, but they are effective. *** By 1943, when The Leopard Man was released, Cornell Woolrich was a known quantity in Hollywood. Manhattan Love Song had been made (1934, from his novel of the same name), as well as Convicted (1938, from the story Face Work), and Street of Chance (1942, from The Black Curtain). RKO Pictures acquired the rights to Black Alibi, and the material wound up with the head of their horror unit, Val Lewton. As with the two films Lewton had produced thus far for the studio, Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie, both commercially successful, RKO gave Lewton the title he would have to use and left him and his team alone for the film’s writing, shooting, and editing. And again, as with Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie, the director would be Jacques Tourneur. Before entering the film world, Lewton had written novels, poetry, and nonfiction. He was a erudite man, and I have to imagine that one thing that drew him to adapting Black Alibi was the challenge of shaping into screenplay form the book’s unusual structure. How to turn this structure where characters die soon after the audience meets them into a story viewers would want to stick with? Not only was this decades before giallos and slasher films, but it was a full seventeen years before Hitchcock’s Psycho, so shocking in 1960 for killing off its heroine forty minutes into the movie. Audiences in 1943 were accustomed to seeing a film with a defined central character, and that main character would last until the final reel. During that reel, the protagonist would survive or die, depending on the story. The Leopard Man’s narrative deviates entirely from what was then conventional, and to write the script, Lewton enlisted Ardel Wray, who had established herself on his team by the impressive work she’d done on I Walked with a Zombie’s screenplay. Wray and Lewton change the Woolrich setting to an unnamed town in New Mexico. They follow the novel’s structure closely apart from this alteration, but what was episodic in the book comes across as free-flowing in the film. Take the character of Clo-Clo. She is the first person we see onscreen after the opening credits, practicing her castanet clicking in her nightclub dressing room. Then we meet Kiki Walker, Jerry Manning, and the black leopard Manning brings to Kiki. The leopard escapes from the nightclub into the night, and after the ensuing pandemonium and the arrival of the police, Clo-Clo reappears. She says something to the upset Jerry. Then the camera stays with Clo-Clo as she starts on her walk home from the nightclub. We get to know Clo-Clo a bit when she goes to a fortune teller, and afterwards, on her continuing walk, Clo-Clo says hello to a teenage girl leaning out her house’s window. Clo-Clo exits the frame and the camera goes inside the house with the teenage girl. This is Theresa Delgado, and we meet her mother and brother. Now the story picks up with Theresa as the focus, and a vintage Tourneur scene unfolds climaxing with her death. After the funeral services for her, we never see the Delgado family again, but the story later will return to Clo-Clo for a significant stretch, ending in her death. In other words, characters drift in and out of the story in a way that was new in movies at that time, and this was a reason the studio heads at RKO were not crazy about the film once they saw it. They had problems with a horror/mystery story (The Leopard Man has elements of both) that does not proceed in a standard, linear fashion. Critical reaction overall was tepid, and The Leopard Man’s box office didn’t match the expectations that had been set by the previous Lewton-Tourneur collaborations. Watched today, though, you’re bound to think that the film’s free-floating structure anticipates such films as Luis Bunuel’s The Phantom of Liberty (1974) and Richard Linklater’s Slacker (1990). Though neither of these films tries to obey the mechanics of a mystery plot while hopping from story to story, they both follow a storytelling logic similar to The Leopard Man’s. But back to Theresa Delgado for a moment. On the film’s DVD commentary track, William Friedkin discusses the scene in which she dies. As in the book, it’s the escaped leopard that kills her, the sole death the animal causes in the story. Her death culminates with her screaming outside her own front door as her mother and brother, on the other side of the door, frantically try to slide back the stuck bolt lock. They fail in their attempts, Theresa goes silent, and to their horror, a thin stream of blood trickles under the door. It’s a chilling image, and it comes directly from the book, where Woolrich writes that “a tongue of red was licking out at his [Theresa’s brother) bare foot from under the door. Just that in size and shape, the tip of a human tongue. But it was in flux, fluid. Right as their eyes beheld it, it was already widening, lengthening, glittering with its own volatility.” Friedkin asserts that this scene in the film may have stirred something in the mind of none other than Gabriel Garcia Marquez, lodging in the writer’s imagination. As Friedkin states, Marquez worked as a film critic early in his writing career, and he loved American films. Could it be that the trickle of blood under the door in The Leopard Man served as inspiration for the celebrated passage in One Hundred Years of Solitude when the blood of one slain character wends a path back to his mother? “A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buendía house, went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining-room table, went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amaranta’s chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano José, and went through the pantry and came out in the kitchen, where Úrsula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread.” I suppose we can’t know for certain whether Tourneur’s film, and by extension Cornell Woolrich, inspired Marquez, but it’s an interesting question to ponder. For his part, William Friedkin declares that he met Marquez once and that he has no doubt Marquez saw the movie at some juncture before writing his masterpiece. As I’ve mentioned, Black Alibi is in part a serial killer novel, though the term “serial killer” didn’t exist when Woolrich wrote the book, and The Leopard Man in turn serves as one of the first examples of a film to tackle this type of criminal behavior in at least a somewhat believable manner. Fritz Lang had done M in Germany in 1931, and though The Leopard Man isn’t on the level of M, it does treat its subject soberly. As with all the films Val Lewton produced for RKO, there is no shirking from psychological darkness. All human impulses, in Lewton’s world, are worthy of serious study. In Black Leopard, we don’t get much insight into what drove the killer to become the person he is or why a leopard’s escape from captivity spurred him to go on a homicidal rampage, sowing terror in the town, but we understand without question that this is a human being driven by an internal compulsion that he will act on until he is stopped. Could this new approach in a Hollywood film have been yet another reason the film did so-so box office business in 1943? Perhaps. But regardless of what audiences thought then, the willingness to delve into aberrant psychology, in however rudimentary a form, has helped the film age well. It has a timeless quality because Lewton and company recognized that no monsters are as scary or ever will be as scary as human ones. View the full article

I’m often asked, “Where do you get your ideas?” My answer always varies, as each book is different. But for my latest, Mister Lullaby, the idea was sparked by a luridly creepy picture of the Petite Ceinture, a once-thriving and now abandoned railway looping around the center of Paris, built more than 150 years ago. Moss and algae now festoon the stone entrances and exits, with doors that lead down to the hidden world of the Paris catacombs below. Inside the Petite Ceinture, the silence is palpable; the darkness, seemingly eternal; the echoes, endless; the phosphorus mushrooms glowing in the darkest recesses, unworldly. My fictional tunnel in Harrod’s Reach, Nebraska, abandoned since a deadly derailment in the early 1900’s, has seen its fair share of turmoil and murders, and because of the legends a game called In-One-Out-One has, for decades now, become commonplace amongst the children of the town. The rules of the game are very simple, you run in one end of the tunnel and hopefully come out the other. I say hopefully because, over a span of a hundred and fifty years, on three different occurrences at the Harrod’s Reach Tunnel, three entered and never came out. They were never seen or heard from again. And while the game is figment of my imagination, I’d like to present to you 5 abandoned tunnels where my answer to playing In-One-Out-One would be a definitive NO! These tunnels are in no particular order of scariness, but how can we not start with the one nicknamed The Bloody Pit? Otherwise known as The Hoosac Tunnel, in North Adams, Massachusetts. This tunnel, built in 1873, at nearly 5 miles long, was once the longest tunnel of its kind in the world. The construction alone killed an estimated 200 workers, earning out its nickname before it even opened. Those who brave the tunnel in modern day claim to hear strange winds and disembodied voices and see ghostly apparitions and a dark so void of light you can’t see a hand in front of your face. But the kicker for me, was hearing about a man named Bernard Hastaba, who, in 1973, must have played his own version of In-One-Out-One, because one day he walked into the tunnel on the North Adams side and NEVER re-emerged. The Screaming Tunnel, in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, built in the early 1900’s, upon first glance, would be tempting to me. It’s short, very short, so short, in fact, that you could probably throw a stone through it if you’ve got a good arm. 125-feet of arched limestone. I could probably get through it in seconds, not minutes. In-One-Out-One? I might be able to do this! But what’s that you say? A girl was burned alive inside this tunnel a hundred years ago? And you can still hear her screaming? Suddenly, now the moss and algae clinging to those porous stones doesn’t look so inviting. I’m not going in one side tunnel and hoping to come out the other, no matter how short it is. Especially after hearing if you light a match inside it, the ghost of the girl immediately blows it out, and then appears next to you! Vampires anyone? According to legend, that’s what we’re dealing with inside Richmond, Virginia’s Church Hill Tunnel. This tunnel comes with a little side history, in the name of a man called W.W. Pool, who apparently was chased out of England for Vampirism. But even if only a little bit of proof is in this pudding, I’m not eating it. And I’m not playing In-One-Out-One inside this 4000-foot-long bohemouth, which was cursed from the start in the early 1870s, with flooding and cave-ins, with at least ten workers dying in the process. On Oct 2nd 1925, a massive cave-in occurred around the center of the tunnel, trapping and wounding and killing several men. Eyewitnesses saw a man running from the tunnel’s end. But it wasn’t a man, they claimed, but a creature with fangs and decomposing flesh and a mouth splashed with blood. The mysterious, hideous thing became known as the Richmond Vampire, and it sprinted into the nearby Hollywood Cemetery and disappeared into the mausoleum of one, W.W. Pool. Some say the mausoleum door was opened in time to see a coffin lid closing inside. The mausoleum’s only inscriptions, are the name “W.W. Pool’ and the year 1913, giving the impression that, perhaps, Mr. W.W. Pool is immortal! And do those double W’s not resemble fangs? People today, walking near the tunnel, claim to hear digging noises and screams and distant, muffled shouts, of ‘Get me out! Get me out!’ from those workers so long ago trapped. There’s no way I’m playing In-One-Out-One inside this tunnel! Next! A bona fide coal mining ghost town called Moonville? Sounds cool! A hundred foot long tunnel—not too bad—built in the 1850s to transport coal through southern Ohio. Protruding bricks spell out the name MOONVILLE on either side of the tunnel. The color and graffiti covering the entrance scream Mister Lullaby. Any remnants of the train tracks have long-ago been plucked for keepsakes. This tunnel may have been an inspiration for my story, but In-One-Out-One is out of the question. In the late 1850’s, a railroad worker was crushed by an oncoming train, and inside the belly of the tunnel, rumor says you can still see the lantern he was carrying, glowing as an orb of light. Some say the man was eight-foot-tall, and his shadow stretches even longer. Another legend claims Moonville is a ghost town because it was struck by the plague, and all the ghosts are ones who died in the epidemic! Not happening! And so onward to our final mountain hole destination, the infamous Sensabaugh Tunnel in Hawkins County, Tennessee, with stories of murder, death, and satanic rituals. Built in the 1920s, the tunnel itself—now covered in colorful graffiti, and the road that travels through it full of potholes—was named after the man who owned the land, a Mr. Edward Sensabaugh, who lived with his family in a house not far away through the woods. As the story goes, Mr. Sensabaugh went crazy one evening, murdered his entire family—including his newborn baby—and then deposited all of their bodies inside the tunnel. Ever since, people who have driven through the tunnel have heard their screams, have seen their apparitions, and have heard their eternally trapped cries echo. Many have reported having their car engines die inside the tunnel. And even more, if you turn off the engine while parked inside the tunnel, cars then suddenly won’t restart. But what are those footsteps? Getting louder… Whatever you do don’t look in the rearview mirror while trying to restart your car, you might just see a woman in the back seat, or the ghost of Mr. Sensabaugh slowly approaching the stalled car from behind. The car might start back up just in time, but on the other side of the tunnel, when you’ve seemingly made it through safely to the other side, you’ll then notice handprints on the windows, both large and small, young and old… *** View the full article

Here in Avalon was never supposed to be about fairies. I’d envisioned the novel—a literary thriller about two sisters, one of whom, Cecilia, goes missing after getting involved with a mysterious interactive theatre troupe—as a straightforwardly Gothic cult story: complete with plenty of murders to solve. And, two or so drafts in, it still wasn’t working—or at least not working in the way I wanted it to. The characters weren’t quite coalescing; their motivations weren’t quite making sense; the Avalon itself—the shadowy cabaret troupe at the heart of the novel’s plot—always just beyond my reach, thematically, even as more and more of the book’s scenes were set there. And then a throwaway line in the novel’s third draft changed everything. In a moment of frustration, Paul—Cecilia’s estranged yet maddeningly loyal husband—refers to his wife as “running away with the fairies.” At last, the whole novel—and what I wanted to do with it—made sense. Here in Avalon was always intended as a kind of conflicted valentine to those moments, those friendships, those relationships, that seem to exist outside reality, or else to transform it. When we are in love; when we are awake setting the world to rights at three o’clock in the morning; when we watch the dawn with friends and chosen family who once were as lost as we were but are now, at yearned-for last, found; when we convince ourselves that at last we have found the right way to live, the right people to live with, that at last we can free ourselves of human strictures and human sins because we have figured out every last certain that nobody else in human history has figured out before—reality takes on a new shape. We are living in a fairy-tale; the whole world seems enchanted. It was a feeling I’d encountered, each time more significantly, so often in my life. I’d felt it in during a transitional time in my early twenties, disillusioned with graduate school and uncertain about my own faith and future, falling under the spell of Sleep No More, a New York-based interactive, site-specific theatrical mashup of Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Hitchcock’s Rebecca: which brought a whole ever-closer coterie of fellow obsessives to its shows, attendant bars, and parties. I’d felt it five years later in Venice, when—while researching a travel story—I found myself swept up by a group of wildly eccentric, extravagantly generous regular attendees of the annual carnival. And I’d felt it five years after that, in the wake of a broken engagement: a manic, joyful Christmas season colored by my encounter with the Bruderhof: an Anabaptist, pacifist Christian intentional community. (whose very good culture and politics magazine, Plough, I still regularly write for), whose tagline, another life is possible, I cribbed in its entirety for the Avalon. Each of these communities inspired me; there was a time where I wanted to live my whole life inside those worlds. And yet, in each of these cases, my desire to throw myself into each new community was inextricable from my desire to run away from who I had been before, to leave behind some aching, taxing element of reality I could not stand to confront. And so fairyland—that liminal space, at once more beautiful than ordinary reality and yet an ultimately lifeless simulacrum from it—became the primary governing metaphor of the novel; the fairy-tale the genre that the novel’s primary characters—each one alienated, lost, and searching in their own way for meaning—take up and wrestle with as they try to work out whether their own lives are tragedies, comedies, or something in between. The cult of the Avalon— and indeed it is a cult, albeit one even its most virulent detractors in the novel cannot bring themselves to wholeheartedly condemn—is deeply indebted to the idea of “fairyland”: that realm of eternal childhood that entices us by offering us an escape from adult life, adult responsibilities, adult routine, even as that escape cuts us off from the most harrowing, and human, elements of reality. Fairies, after all, are not good or evil, exactly, as far as mythological beings go. Unlike, say, the witch—a mythological figure of wickedness given renewed cultural cachet by her associations with sexualized evil, and with it a kind of imagistic rejoinder to patriarchal authority—the fairy does not necessary stand in direct opposition to the Christian God. Nor is the fairy’s seduction—as opposed to that, say, of the vampire—coded as a sexual one: an enthrallment that shrouds a power exchange in which one figure is destroyed and the other renewed. Rather, fairies—think Midsummer’s Puck—are often playful, trickster figures; allied not with God or Satan but curiously, almost innocently, outside the binary altogether. If their desire is to steal young humans, as occurs in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the W.B. Yeats play The Land of Heart’s Desire or in my personal favorite, the Scottish ballad and legend “Tam Lin,” it is not because they want to eat them or sacrifice them to Satan, but because they genuinely believe that life dancing under the stars or in the woods is better than the life those foolish mortals live. They promise—and sometimes even deliver—eternal innocence. As the fairy child in Yeats’ play (from which I cribbed a few more of the Avalon’s songs) puts it, beckoning a disaffected bride to join her: “But I can lead you…Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise/Where nobody gets old and godly and grave, Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue/And where kind tongues bring no captivity’. For we are only true to the far lights/We follow singing, over valley and hill.” The life fairies promise, often, is not one of indulgence or decadence or sexual liberation (think of the devil in The Witch offering his new ward a chance to “live deliciously”), but instead a kind of endless teenage cast party: song, dancing, merriment, beauty, community. And still, something is missing. Wrapped up with the idea of fairyland is the idea that it is an escape—but also a betrayal, especially for those left behind. Those who go over to fairyland are loved, are missed, are mourned. The fairies may be traditionally coded as beyond good and evil, in a way that other mythological beings aren’t, but that also means they foreclose the chance of ever being truly good—in Christian language, you might say that they don’t have a soul. Their innocence is a rejection of experience: their childhood a rejection of the idea that reality, with all its mistakes and all its disappointments and all its unhappy endings, could ever have in it something worth fleeing fairyland for. There are—spoiler alert—no literal fairies in Here in Avalon, which is set firmly in the “real world,” albeit a world rendered a little bit more magical by the Avalon’s place in it. But this idea of a place we might long to run away to—and must inevitably return from—helped me to clarify what, exactly, the Avalon was all about, and what Here in Avalon was supposed to be. It’s a story of the moments, the possibilities, the passions, that can take us out of ourselves, and maybe, sometimes, out of the world. But at its core, it’s a story about coming home. *** View the full article

Cozy mystery is a subgenre of crime fiction. When readers ask what are cozy mysteries, I explain they’re mysteries without on-the-page violence, physical intimacy or naughty words. That’s the quick-and-simple answer. Then I watch as their faces light up with understanding. I love that moment. Of course, people who read cozy mystery novels—also called cozies—know there’s a lot more to this subgenre than stories without gore, sex or obscenities. It’s not just about what they don’t have. What I love most about cozies—in addition to the mysteries—are the elements they do have. I love the humor, the quirky secondary characters, the closeknit communities, and especially the intrepid amateur sleuths who use their unique skills and investigative team to solve murders. We can trace the cozy mystery subgenre to the early 20th century. Agatha Christie is considered the Mother of Cozy Mysteries, which is the reason National Cozy Mystery Day is observed each year on her birthday, Sept. 15. Save the date so you don’t miss the fun next time. Cozy mystery authors have always sought to grow the definition of cozies by pushing its boundaries. We’re always expanding the cozy mystery novel subgenre by mixing in other fiction genres. These include—but are not limited to—historical, paranormal and romance. Let’s take a look at each of these three cozy mystery book subgenres. Historical cozy mystery novels The combination of historical fiction and cozy mysteries results in cozies sent during time periods considered historical from the author’s perspective. But it’s more than telling your readers that your story is set in the 1940s, for example. You have to show them. You do this through the events, people, attire and language that appear in your mystery. For example, you wouldn’t have a Coachella concert in a mystery set in the 1920s. Mini-skirts weren’t the rage in the 1940s. Jay-Z wouldn’t headline the Super Bowl halftime concert in 1968. And although Sydney Poitier was rizz in the 1957 movie “To Sir, with Love,” reviewers wouldn’t have used that term to describe him. In fact, I recently learned that Gen Alpha slang for “charismatic.” Most importantly, your sleuth’s method of investigation would need to reflect your story’s historical era. Keep in mind that fingerprinting wasn’t used in the United States until the 1900s. DNA testing wasn’t introduced until the 1980s. And if you want to set a historical cozy mystery book in the 1930s, your sleuths wouldn’t be able to access social media to research their suspects. Here are two books that are great examples of historical cozy mysteries: The Lady Darby Mysteries by Anna Lee Huber. There are 12 books in this series, which is set in 1830s Scotland and features Lady Kiera Darby. The Klondike Mysteries by Vicki Delany. This five-book series takes place in the 1890s in the Yukon territories during the gold rush. It features amateur sleuth Fiona MacGillivray who owns the Savoy dance hall. Paranormal cozy mystery novels By its nature, paranormal cozy mystery novels rewrite the rules of the real world. Their supernatural elements help your cozy mystery differentiate itself even more from other stories. But these elements must be more than window dressing. Your talking cat shouldn’t just be chatty. Your mind-reading dog shouldn’t just be nosy. Talking animals, needy ghosts, magical powers or whatever supernatural elements you choose should be used to help solve the mystery. Take this test. If you can remove all of your paranormal elements from your story without hurting the plot, then you haven’t written a paranormal cozy mystery novel. These two books are great examples of paranormal cozy mysteries: The Gethsemane Brown Mysteries by Alexia Gordon. There are five books in this cozy mystery series. The amateur sleuth, Gethsemane Brown, is an American music teacher. She relocates to Ireland and moves into a charming cottage. Right away, we have our fish-out-of-water character who’s made even more unique by the fact that she solves murders with the help of her resident ghost and friend, Eamon McCarthy. Murder in G Major, the first Gethsemane Brown Mystery, was made into a Hallmark mystery movie titled Haunted Harmony Mysteries: Murder in G Major. The Enchanted Bay Mysteries by Esme Addison. There are currently two books in this series with a third coming soon. The series is set in a quiet seaside town. The amateur sleuth, Aleksandra Daniels, her maternal relatives and several Bellamy Bay residents are descended from mermaids and have magical powers. These characters use their powers to both commit crimes and solve murders. Romantic cozy mystery novels Romantic cozy mystery novels combine romantic fiction—usually the light-hearted, humorous elements of romantic comedy—and crime fiction. As an author who writes both romance and mystery novels, I enjoy romantic cozy mystery books, or romcozies as they’re also called. Cozy mystery author Gabby Allan has been credited with coining the term. In romcozies, the amateur sleuth usually is the one with the romantic interest. Their crush could be a key member of the sleuth’s investigative team. Or the love connection could be with a member of law enforcement who is either opposed to or supportive of the sleuth’s interference in the case. Their relationship could start off with fireworks or it could be a slow burn. Either way, make it clear to the reader that the characters in question are destined for romance. As with the other cozy mystery subgenres, you can test whether you have a true romcozy by pulling out the romance. If the mystery and character conflicts remain intact without the romance, then you don’t have a romantic cozy mystery. Your central characters’ relationship isn’t critical to the conflict. Here are two books that are great examples of romcozies: The Sassy Cat Mysteries by Jennifer Chow: The amateur sleuth, Mimi Lee, owns a pet grooming shop. She solves murders with the help of her talking cat, Marshmallow, and her dreamy lawyer neighbor, Josh. So technically, this cozy mystery trilogy combines paranormal and romantic elements. Bonus! The Amish Candy Shop Mysteries by Amanda Flower: Bailey King is an amateur sleuth and the owner of an Amish candy shop. She investigates murders with the help of her law enforcement boyfriend, Aiden Brody. We’ve only reviewed three examples of fiction genres blending with cozy mystery novels here. Whatever fiction genre you mix into your cozy mystery—historical, paranormal, romance, steam punk, etc.—it’s important to remain true to the roots of cozy mysteries: no on-the-page violence, physical intimacy or naughty words Happy sleuthing! *** View the full article

I’m a city girl, but I really enjoy reading stories set in state parks and forests and islands and other areas where there is less population, and the environment is as much of a character as the people. And the wildlife? Oh, yes, I want to meet them too. I write stories mostly set in urban areas and also like reading city stories. But my current mystery series, the Alaska Untamed Mysteries, was inspired by my most recent Alaskan cruise. I’ve written other mystery series, but this is my first under a pseudonym: Lark O. Jensen—not far from my real name of Linda O. Johnston. And this series involves the remote environment and, even more, the wildlife. Why was I inspired? Well, when in port in Alaska near Juneau, I took a boat tour where naturalists onboard pointed out some of the wonderful wildlife in the area. And that area itself was fascinating—the water, the mountains surrounding where we sailed, the beautiful blue sky… It was a time of the year in Alaska when the weather was good for such an outing. And so naturalist Stacie Calder was born in my mind. She didn’t have a name then, but I knew I had to write stories about that area. I even started researching and asking questions of those naturalists onboard to get started. I saw mama seals with their babies on ice floes on the water, bears and moose and wolves on the nearby mountains. I didn’t meet them in person, but they wound up in my stories. So far there are two stories: Bear Witness and Cry Wolf. Bear Witness is focused on a tour boat like the one that inspired me, and Stacie presents tours there. Her wonderful husky Sasha is with her. Nearly all my books include dogs, and I always love to read other stories with dogs in them. And Cry Wolf, the new book in the series, takes place in the Alaskan winter, when tour boats don’t go out into the icy water. Instead, Stacie spends the winter at a nearby wildlife sanctuary, Sasha again by her side. Other authors also write stories that take place in special far-off locations and often contain wonderful descriptions of those areas, as well as wildlife there—at least sometimes. Quite a few books like that are out there, and I’m always looking for more. For example, there are the many Anna Pigeon stories of Nevada Barr. In one, Winter Study, Anna is involved with a wolf study team in Isle Royale National Park near Lake Superior. In this story, a moose is killed early on, and there are some fairly graphic descriptions of what happens to his remains, including what other wildlife gets him as food. My preference in stories is the certification of the American Humane Association: No Animals Were Harmed. But in reality, animals do survive by eating each other—and humans who aren’t vegetarians eat animals too. The descriptions are handled well in this story, including how wolves, ravens, foxes and even fish benefit. Plus, when stories are mysteries, people are killed too, and the protagonists have to help figure out whodunnit. That happens in my stories as well. And in Winter Study, there are also excellent descriptions of the environment. Nevada Barr is skilled at doing that. In High Country, which takes place in Yosemite National Park, there are descriptions of the area including mountains, cliffs, boulders and ponderosa pines. She indicates the area is mostly wilderness but there are people around, and in the areas where they hang out there is machinery for their benefit. Another book I enjoy that involves Alaska is Alaskan Catch, by Sue Pethick. It’s not necessarily a mystery, more of a rom-com, but it does contain suspense… and some fun descriptions of Alaska and the environment. In it, Emily Prentice is a marine biologist who leaves her boyfriend behind and goes to Ketchikan for a NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) internship—in a fish cannery! Lots of smells and goo, plus a large but loving Newfoundland dog who knocks Emily over and into that goo. Fortunately, despite all that goo it’s not totally graphic. Some of the story involves how the boats go out to catch fish. It also describes seaplanes and boats including a ferry, and there’s more about the Alaskan atmosphere, including cloudy skies, but golden sun sometimes. And there are storms, heavy swells in water, rain causing difficult flights. Plus, there are gray-winged seagulls and great gray owls. It’s another enjoyable story involving the environment and wildlife. Another story I liked a lot that involves the environment and wildlife, is Cold Wind, by Paige Shelton. If you happen to look at my books, the cover flaps indicate they are perfect for fans of Paige Shelton. Our stories are different, of course, but I appreciate their likening mine to Paige Shelton’s. In Cold Wind, after being kidnapped thriller writer Beth Rivers had fled her home in St. Louis in a prior story, and wound up in the town of Benedict, Alaska, where she has taken over running a small newspaper. She lives in a halfway house for parolees to get their lives together, even though she’s not one. But she does feel somewhat protected there. She meets a lot of people in the area, including a park ranger and a native Tlingit, as well as the woman in charge of the halfway house. The area is definitely Alaskan, with snow-covered grounds, old houses, foothills, even ice caves. Wildlife? Yes, including bears and wolves, and even a few horses running wild on the streets. Some of my other favorite stories? Check out Chasing Justice by Kathleen Donnelly, the first of her National Park K-9 Series books. Definitely suspenseful. Definitely enjoyable. The protagonist, Maya Thompson, has been in the military but wound up coming home. She now works with the U.S. Forest Service and has her K-9 Jupiter, a Malinois, at her side. They’re often out in the wilds of Colorado seeking bad guys: drug dealers… and murderers. And now and then, in the enchanting atmosphere of the forest and mountains, they see wildlife such as mama and baby deer. Then there are the wonderful Timber Creek K-9 Mysteries by Margaret Mizushima, where Deputy Mattie Cobb and her K-9 partner Robo are also involved in helping to solve crimes in the wilds of Colorado. Wildlife appears there too, such as the mountain lions in Stalking Ground—dangerous as well as fascinating. And descriptions of the icy, mountainous area around Timber Creek while seeking bad guys, and good ones too, is always inspirational, including in Striking Range. So… As I said, there are a lot more authors and a lot more books out there taking place in appealing, remote areas. I enjoy the descriptions of the various environments, including forests, mountains and, of course, water areas. And I always enjoy hearing about wildlife, as well as reading about the characters’ dogs. *** View the full article

Who doesn’t love a superbly executed plot twist? One that completely takes you by surprise and turns the story on its head. One that makes you gasp out loud because you truly did not see it coming. There have been times when I have been totally blindsided by a twist and every time that happens I absolutely love it. I am particularly thinking of Greer Hendricks’ The Wife Between Us here, which will always stay with me for the fact that it was so superbly done and I don’t believe I have ever seen it executed quite like this novel does anywhere else. (I won’t add any spoilers here.) But the latter point in itself is important. Because as soon as a twist is replicated, it becomes easier for a reader to guess. The secret is to come up with a cracking new way of incorporating a twist into your novel. Easier said than done, right? Plot twists are expected in the crime and thriller genre. No one wants to read a book, or watch a TV series that unfurls in exactly the way the reader believes it will. Many books are now marketed on the strengths of their twists with straplines and quotes on the covers the marvel at, “a twist you won’t see coming.” And yet this in itself causes a problem for me both as a reader and a writer. As a reader I often find myself second guessing that twist I now know is coming, even when I don’t want to do so. And as a writer it means the pressure of feeling like I have to constantly up my game because readers are not easy to trick! But maybe that’s no bad thing. At the start of my writing process I will always ensure I know what my key plot twist is going to be. Without fail it comes a close second to generating the idea for the story, which is often the premise of the book. My idea for my latest novel, For the Last Time, centred around the idea of a couple and their marriage counsellor, and how much power that counsellor could have. As soon as I had figured out what the story was to be I set about figuring out the twist. How was I going to radically change its direction? What did I want my readers to believe that wasn’t actually the case? And once I had worked this out, how could I put them off the scent? It is so important that I know this at an early stage and certainly before I start writing any words, because without it I don’t have a book. There are a number of ways to write in a twist. It could be character driven such as the good guy is actually the bad guy, or vice versa. There could be an unreliable narrator, whose traits may reveal themselves over time rather than in one punch. I personally like this way of drip feeding clues, and allowing the reader to start suspecting the main character themselves rather than have the book tell them. But what does a plot twist need to do to perform successfully? First and foremost it should be a genuine surprise to the reader that engages them further. It needs to be set up in a way that the reader does not see it coming, and yet when it happens it makes them wonder how they didn’t, and how they’ve been tricked so easily. But it mustn’t come out of nowhere. The clues must be there, hidden in the story. If you were to go back through the book, you need to be able to find them and then kick yourself for ever missing them! While I am working on what my plot twists will be, I am also thinking about where they will appear. The main twist does not need to come at the end of the story, in fact in a few of my books my key ones come at the mid-way point. Revealing a major plot twist half way through can be a brilliant way of making the reader realise that everything they have assumed and taken for granted up to this point is in fact wrong, and personally I love this. When this is done it is equally important to understand what happens after the reveal. Effectively this is the start of a new line of story, which means it needs to keep capturing the readers’ attention, especially if you have answered the main question that has been driving their interest so far. Think Gone Girl. Half way through and it all becomes clear what has happened between Amy and Nick – which one of them is telling the truth and which one is lying, and so the second part of the novel brings a new direction and different questions. And very likely, there is the need for another twist at the end of the book. Once I know what the main twist is going to be I can start figuring out how I will misdirect the reader. This is always built up in layers. I would find it impossible to nail it in one go, in the first draft. In fact many of the mis-directions or little clues I am most proud of will be peppered in further down the line, in third or fourth drafts, when I know my characters and their stories better. It is essential to bury them well and finding the right place to drop them in is crucial. I don’t want the reader finding them before I am ready wherever possible, and although I am prepared that some will always figure out where the story is heading, I hope the majority don’t and a good way to do this can be by following a twist with an even bigger twist. And early readers are always a great test to see whether or not they are working. *** View the full article